Iteration planning
Iteration planning is the team-level event at the start of each SAFe iteration (typically 2 weeks) where the team selects stories from its backlog to commit to, breaks them into tasks, and confirms team capacity. The output is the iteration backlog and the iteration goal — both visible to the rest of the ART.
SAFe's iteration planning is the equivalent of Scrum's sprint planning, with one important addition: the team plans against the PI Objectives committed at PI Planning, not against a fresh backlog each iteration. This couples short-term planning to medium-term commitments and reduces the iteration-by-iteration thrash that loosely coupled Scrum teams sometimes experience. The discipline: at iteration planning, the team confirms it can still meet the PI commitments given new information and capacity changes, and surfaces risk to the RTE if it cannot.
Related terms
- Iteration review
The iteration review is the team-level demo at the end of each iteration in which completed stories are shown to the team and to direct stakeholders.
- Iteration retrospective
The iteration retrospective is the team-level event at iteration end where the team inspects how it worked together — process, collaboration, technical practices — and commits to specific changes for the next iteration.
- Capacity planning
Capacity planning estimates how much work a team can realistically take on in a sprint, accounting for PTO, meetings, on-call duty, and other non-coding time.