CheckRun
pm dev agile

Sprint Planning Checklist

A sprint planning checklist for agile teams. Covers backlog readiness, capacity, goal-setting, task breakdown, and team alignment before each sprint starts.

5 sections 25 items

Checklist preview

Backlog Readiness 6 items
  • Product backlog is groomed and prioritized
  • Top items have clear acceptance criteria
  • Stories are sized (story points or t-shirt sizes)
  • Dependencies between items identified and flagged
  • Technical debt items included where relevant
  • Any items from the previous sprint retrospective included
Capacity & Scope 5 items
  • Team availability confirmed for the sprint duration
  • Holidays, leaves, and part-time commitments accounted for
  • Velocity from last 2-3 sprints reviewed
  • Sprint capacity calculated (available days × avg velocity)
  • Scope selected matches capacity — not over-committed
Sprint Goal 4 items
  • Sprint goal is defined in one clear sentence
  • Sprint goal is aligned with the product roadmap
  • All team members understand and agree on the sprint goal
  • Sprint goal is visible in the project management tool
Task Breakdown 5 items
  • Selected stories broken into tasks or sub-tasks
  • Each task has a clear owner assigned
  • No task is larger than one day of work
  • Definition of Done reviewed and agreed for this sprint
  • Testing and review tasks included in estimates
Alignment 5 items
  • All team members attended or reviewed the planning session
  • Blockers and risks raised and assigned to an owner
  • Sprint board updated and ready
  • Stakeholders informed of sprint goal and scope
  • Next sprint planning date confirmed

A sprint planning checklist prevents the most common planning failures: a backlog that isn’t ready, a team that’s over-committed, or a sprint goal nobody remembers by day three. It takes five minutes to run before planning and saves hours of mid-sprint confusion.

This checklist covers the five elements of a well-run sprint planning session: backlog readiness, team capacity, goal setting, task breakdown, and team alignment.

Who uses this sprint planning checklist

Scrum masters running the planning ceremony and using this as a scrum master checklist to verify readiness before the meeting. Product owners checking that the backlog is in shape. Agile coaches auditing planning quality across multiple teams. Engineering leads at companies without a formal scrum process who want a lightweight agile sprint checklist.

How to run it

Open CheckRun before the sprint planning meeting — ideally the day before. Work through Backlog Readiness and Capacity items first, so any issues can be resolved before the team assembles. Run the remaining sections during or immediately after the planning session. Mark Fail on anything unresolved and assign a comment with the owner and action.

Each run saves with a timestamp. Over time you build a record of sprint planning quality — useful for retrospectives and team coaching.

Adapting this scrum checklist

  • Add a “Definition of Ready” section if your team uses explicit readiness criteria before stories enter the sprint
  • Add story-specific acceptance criteria review items if your team skips backlog grooming
  • Replace story points with hours if your team estimates in hours
  • Add a “Risk register” item if you track sprint risks formally
  • Use alongside the Project Management Checklist for projects that combine agile sprints with a broader project structure

Definition of done checklist

The Definition of Done is a fixed set of criteria every story must meet before it counts as complete: code reviewed, tests passing, deployed to staging, documentation updated. Add your team’s specific definition of done checklist items to the Task Breakdown section so they’re visible during planning, not just at the end of the sprint.

All templates