Generate Structured Sprint Planning Templates

This skill structures sprint planning sessions for agile teams. It covers sprint goal definition, capacity planning that accounts for holidays, meetings, and technical debt, relative story-point estimation, and a Definition of Done. It provides a pre-planning checklist, a sprint overview template (sprint number, goal, success metrics, team capacity with adjustments for PTO/meetings/tech debt), a story selection table with priority/points/assignee/dependencies, a per-story breakdown template (user story format, acceptance criteria, task list with hour estimates, Definition of Done), a risk assessment and mitigation table, an internal/external dependency tracker, a sprint ceremonies schedule (standup, review, retrospective) with a communication plan, and velocity tracking comparing historical, committed, and completed story points. For estimation specifically, it recommends relative sizing - story points, T-shirt sizes, or the Fibonacci sequence - weighing complexity, effort, and uncertainty, and factoring in testing, code review, and deployment time rather than raw coding time alone.

Use it when running or preparing a sprint planning session - building the pre-planning readiness checklist, calculating net team capacity for the sprint, selecting and breaking down stories into tasks with acceptance criteria, assessing sprint risks and dependencies, scheduling sprint ceremonies, or tracking velocity against historical sprints. It also carries facilitation guidance for running the session itself: keep planning timeboxed (a 2-week sprint should take no more than 4 hours to plan), use planning poker or a similar technique so the whole team participates in estimation, focus on "what" and "why" before "how," and document decisions and their rationale as you go.

It does not cover long-term product roadmap planning or backlog grooming techniques in depth - it is focused specifically on the sprint planning session artifact and its structure.

Inputs are typically the team's backlog, capacity, and historical velocity. Outputs include a structured sprint plan, for example the capacity section:

### Team Capacity
Total Sprint Days: [X days]
Available Person-Days: [X days]
Planned Velocity: [X story points]
Capacity Adjustments:
- Holidays/PTO: [-X days]
- Meetings/Ceremonies: [-X days]
- Technical Debt: [-X days]
Net Capacity: [X days]

Other outputs include a story selection table with priority/points/dependencies, a per-story breakdown with acceptance criteria and task-level hour estimates, a risk/mitigation table, an internal/external dependency tracker, a ceremonies schedule with a communication plan (Slack channel, wiki/documentation link, task board, CI/CD pipeline status), and a velocity tracking section comparing committed, stretch, and completed points across sprints, plus a burndown-tracking placeholder. Capacity planning tips baked into the template include leaning on historical velocity data, building in a 10-20% buffer for unexpected issues, and accounting for the learning time a team needs when adopting new technologies.

Scrum Masters and agile teams running sprint planning who need a structured, repeatable template covering capacity, story breakdown, risk, and velocity rather than an ad-hoc planning meeting. The template itself is meant to be adapted rather than used rigidly - team size and experience level, project complexity, organizational tooling standards, sprint duration (one to four weeks), and how much stakeholder involvement a team needs should all shape how it's applied, and it's designed to be revised over time based on retrospective feedback.