Excluding developers who miss sprint planning

It is the Development Team as a whole which forecasts the work that can be achieved during the Sprint, not the individual developers. If the Dev Team can confidently make a forecast including the developer who's on vacation (knowing how he works), then they should do so, and the developer should pick up work on his return.

The Development Team should self-organize to allow for each others' absence, including vacations. Note that a Scrum Master should beware of giving advice that might be interpreted as a command-and-control decision.

+1 to what Ian Mitchell said.

Also, have you considered the implications of 'firing' someone for 1 sprint because they missed sprint planning? Any idea what that will do to morale?

Team member absence's can be schedule, or not. What if someone get sick one day or has to go to a funeral or has a car crash ?

It could be a good experiment to observe what append when a member is missing the Sprint Planniung Meeting.

Thanks a lot for your valuable input. Let me answer Tim's and Olivier's above questions, as I did the "experiment" in a development team of 4 (sprint length 3 weeks):

- The developer was surprised to be excluded from the sprint
- He used the time to fully process his pile of work after 2 weeks vacation (e-mails etc.)
- He did an online-training and did work on some other products
- He attended the daily scrums and backlog grooming meetings
- He improved unit-test coverage of the product
- The Sprint completed successfully (velocity went down, but not 25%)
- Morale was and is still good - we are still friends

Anyway, next time I would include a developer who is not available the first few days in a sprint.

every time you decide instead of team, you are risking having self-organization not to emerge