(Which may in fact happen on the preceding Friday...)
 
(Which may in fact happen on the preceding Friday...)
   −
At the start of the sprint, the team and their immediate manager spend half a day going through the stories - some of which are new and urgent - some are old and dusty (the "Product backlog").  We discuss how we're going to implement each new one and briefly ensure that nothing has changed about the old ones (maybe they've become moot - or need to be rewritten in some way) - and for each new or revised one, we estimate the complexity of the chosen approach using "Planning Poker" (I kid you not!).  We each have a hand of special "planning poker" playing cards for each engineer (they have goats on them!) - they are marked with numbers in the corners.  The numbers are in units of "difficulty" - which is an abstract quantity that doesn't relate to "effort" or "man-hours" (well, not directly).  We have a handful of old "benchmark" stories that we can compare to.  We have a gut feel for what is a 10 point story, what is a 3 pointer and so on.
+
At the start of the sprint, the team and their immediate manager spend half a day going through the stories - some of which are new and urgent - some are old and dusty (the "Product backlog").  We discuss how we're going to implement each new one and briefly ensure that nothing has changed about the old ones (maybe they've become moot - or need to be rewritten in some way) - and for each new or revised one, we estimate the complexity of the chosen approach.