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PSPO 1/PSM 1 Type of Question - Sprint Planning Meeting Timebox - Trying to Resolve Insconsitencies

Last post 12:24 pm May 5, 2017 by Ian Mitchell
1 reply
03:16 pm May 4, 2017

I have passed the PSM 1 Exam and I am currently studying for the PSPO 1 Exam.  I have the following question that I am asking from the point of view of what the correct answer would be based on Scrum.Org’s current viewpoint. I am getting inconsistent answers from different sources on this question and I am trying to resolve these inconsistencies:

Question:      The latest version of the Scrum Guide does not appear to divide the Sprint Planning meeting into 2 separate meetings that are both time-boxed, as it did in the past.  It all appears to be one meeting with 1 time-box.  Hence, if we have a 2 week Sprint, with a 4 hour time-box for the meeting, and we spend 1 hour on answering the “what” question, we will have 3 hours remaining to answer the “how” question.  This is unlike how it would have been with a previous version of the Sprint Guide (I believe the 2009 Version) where you would have 2 separate 2 hour time-boxes, one for Part 1 and another for Part 2.  In this case, for a 2 week Sprint, if you spend 1 hour answering the ‘what’ question, you would have only 2 hours to answer the ‘how’ question.  Please confirm that the current way of handling this situation is with only 1 time-box, based on my above explanation, having 3 hours available to answer the “how” question, after you used 1 hour to answer the ‘what” question in a 2 week Sprint. 


12:24 pm May 5, 2017

Sprint Planning is indeed one timebox. It's up to the teams to decide how much of the available time within that session they spend on each planning topic.

They could address each topic separately within nested timeboxes in Sprint Planning if they wished, but that is an implementation decision which would be up to them.


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