Listening: Sprint Planning Kickoff

Available capacity is a core sprint planning term. It refers to the total productive time a team has in a sprint after subtracting non-working time such as holidays, leave days, and meetings.

Key vocabulary in context:

• "available capacity" = person-days or hours the team can actually work this sprint
• "accounting for" = after subtracting / after considering — common planning phrase
• "person-days" = one person working for one full day; 34 person-days = e.g. 5 people × ~7 days each

Why the Dev Lead adjusts the target: Historical velocity (38 points) reflects full-capacity sprints. With reduced capacity, committing to the same number of points would be overcommitting. The phrase "adjust our planning target down" shows professional capacity-aware planning.

Divergence in planning poker means team members revealed significantly different estimates — a signal that the ticket is not well enough understood by everyone.

Planning Poker vocabulary:

• "I'd give this a 5 / I'm at an 8" — informal ways to state your estimate; note the phrasing "I'm at [number]" is very common
• "divergence" — when estimates are far apart, indicating different assumptions
• "walk us through your reasoning" — explain your thinking; a discussion prompt to surface hidden assumptions
• "spike" — a time-boxed investigation task to reduce uncertainty before estimating or building

Why divergence is valuable: In agile, a wide spread of estimates is not a problem — it is information. It surfaces missing context, different interpretations, or unknown risks. The re-estimation after discussion usually converges and improves shared understanding.

Definition of Ready (DoR) is a shared checklist that a backlog item must satisfy before the team agrees to work on it in a sprint. It is distinct from the Definition of Done, which describes when a task is complete.

Key vocabulary:

• "Definition of Ready" — the entry criteria for pulling a ticket into a sprint (not to be confused with Definition of Done)
• "acceptance criteria" — the conditions that must be true for the ticket to be considered done; must be defined before work starts
• "technical approach" — a high-level plan for implementation; reduces mid-sprint surprises
• "unresolved dependencies" — other work or external factors the ticket relies on; if unresolved, the ticket is not ready
• "a sprint we can commit to" — modern agile often uses "forecast" rather than "commit", but "commit" is still common in speech

DoR vs DoD: DoR = is the work ready to start? DoD = is the work ready to ship?