The Iteration Planning Meeting should only take a few hours. The whole team can attend: (stakeholders, developers, testers, project managers, etc). Stakeholders (or their representatives) pick stories, generally in the order of business value. The team gives a best-guess number of story points they think they can finish building the story. The total story points for the iteration time window is the velocity.
It’s important to note that velocity is a guess, not a promise. It helps the stakeholders choose how much work we can focus on during the iteration, but it isn’t a commitment.
We plan, deliver, and learn. After the first iteration we use real outcomes to improve future guesses.
Discussions for your team
- Are our planning meetings too long?
- Do we have the right set of people at these meetings?
- Do the stakeholders have what they need to be able to organize the stories?
- What initial velocity will we guess and why?
- When will we review and update our velocity?