In the Scrum agile framework, a Sprint Planning meeting is an event that establishes the product development goal and plans for the upcoming sprint, based on the team’s review of its product backlog.

Although sprint planning sessions can at times benefit from input from various members of an organization, the key participants in any sprint planning session will be:

• The Scrum Master (who typically runs and coordinates the meeting).
• The Product Owner (who will explain the product backlog items, answer backlog questions, and help define the sprint goal).
• The Development Team (who will make commitments to the work, estimate timeframes, and explain any capacity or skill-set issues that could prevent work from getting done).

In scrum, a product increment is whatever you previously built, plus anything new you just finished in the latest sprint, all integrated, tested, and ready to be delivered or deployed. Without a usable product increment, development teams are delaying the delivery of value and are missing opportunities to get real user feedback and adapt the product to ensure customer satisfaction. On the other hand, incremental releases allow for fast feedback, quicker innovation, continuous improvement, rapid adaptation to change, and more delighted customers.

Trust is the bedrock of self-organizing agile teams. Trust allows agile teams to communicate quickly and respond rapidly to changes as they emerge. Without sufficient trust, team members can waste effort and energy hoarding information, forming cliques, dodging blame, and covering their tracks. A climate of trust provides the foundation for effective team processes, adaptability, and high performance.

The Product Goal describes a long-term objective or future state of the product. It is a vital part of the Product Backlog, referred to in the Scrum Guide as a commitment. The Scrum Team uses the Product Goal to plan against and maintain focus.

Product Goals were added to the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide. The idea of incorporating this concept was to emphasize the importance of having a longer-term goal than a Sprint Goal. Plenty of research on self-managed, goal-oriented teams shares that goals give focus.

The Scrum team can estimate either during product backlog refinement or during sprint planning events.
The objective of the Estimation would be to consider the User Stories for the Sprint by Priority and by the ability of the team to deliver during the Time Box of the Sprint.
Agile teams usually estimate effort using a metric called story points. Story points are the abstract value that takes into account the relative complexity and size of a task. Teams tend not to estimate based on person hours, but instead use Story points – a concept inherited from Extreme Programming (XP).

Scrum practices and values put emphasis on collaboration and communication. The performance appraisal creates an agenda divide as the employee uses it to try to highlight his or her performance in order to get raises and promotions, while the manager uses the appraisal to divvy up scarce departmental resources. Both agendas can be a motivation for conscious or subconscious distortion of the data, or to behaviors that ultimately benefit the person doing them, but not the company or customer. The appraisal fosters low trust competition in the team rather than self-organizing to meet customer needs.