When someone gets introduced to the Scrum framework, I’ve found one of the best places to start is reviewing the four primary events, or “ceremonies”. While ceremonies may seem like an ambitious word for what seem to be recurring meetings, they’re incredibly important for helping the team stay in contact with each other while working on individual tasks.
The Agile Manifesto was first created by 17 thought leaders in the software development space in the early 2000s. The group wanted to identify what processes would lead to a successful development project. Two of those thought leaders, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber had developed the Scrum process in 1995, and as Agile software development has become more prevalent over the last two decades, it has become one of the most common agile practices at many large and small organizations. The Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org are two of the most recognized certification organizations that provide in depth training in Scrum fundamentals.
What is a Sprint?
A Sprint is a period of time (typically 1-4 weeks, my team runs 2 week sprints) that has a specific Goal. In the development world, my teams breaks down application features into Stories, and then (ideally) finishes one or more complete features each Sprint. One of the primary goals of a Sprint, regardless of length, is that everything that is worked on during the sprint can be released to production at the end of the Sprint. From the businesses point of view, this means that the development team is providing smaller features more often as opposed to one big bang release less often. The development team gets feedback quickly from the business, and adjusts their development based on the feedback to (hopefully) create valuable software as quickly as possible.
Scrum Ceremonies
The Ceremonies help provide a strict time boxed events that occur throughout a Sprint. These events help keep the team in contact with each other, and they ensure the team is consistently working towards the sprint goal.
Sprint Planning – The planning event is done on the first day of sprint over 1-4 hours where the development team reviews items in the backlog to accept into the sprint. Typically someone representing the business, like the Scrum Product owner, is in this meeting to help answer questions about and tickets before they are accepted. Once all of the tickets that are going to be included in the Sprint have been accepted by the development team, the Sprint will start, and the team will start coding.
Daily scrum – Each day of sprint, the development team, along with the Scrum Master, will meet to review progress towards the sprint goal. Traditionally, the developers meet up for this very quick (typically 15 minute) meeting. This meeting may also be known as the daily stand-up, because many teams located in the same meeting literally get together and stand-up to ensure it doesn’t turn into an extended meeting. The goal of the meeting to provide transparency into how the team is progressing towards the sprint goal as well as identify impediments. Typically, each will answer these three questions:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What are you planning to do today?
- Do you have any blockers?
Stand-up is not where the team tries to solve any potential problems, only identify if any exist. For anything that needs more in depth analysis, the team should find time separately to work together to resolve the problem. If the problem is outside of the control of the team, then it is up to the Scrum Master to try to identify a solution.
Iteration Review – It’s feedback time for the team. Often called a demo, on the last day of the sprint, the team provides an iteration review so they can show the stakeholders what they completed during the Sprint. Ideally, this process involves the both business and technical members so that they can receive fast feedback on whether the work they did provides value for the business. During the meeting each team member will provide a working demonstration of the work completed and answer questions as needed.
Retrospective – The final ceremony also occurs on the final day of the Sprint, and during this meeting, the team meets to do a review of the sprints processes. This is a vital step to a healthy scrum team as it provides a safe environment for teams to talk about what went well, what went poorly, and how the team can improve during the next sprint.
What’s next?
After a sprint has completed, the next sprint starts, and the team takes the feedback from the sprint retrospective to try to make improvements on their internal processes. Fundamentally, Scrum is a framework of constant small improvements to reach an end goal, and each sprint provides the opportunity to achieve new goals.
Learn More: How Backlog Grooming Sessions Helped Me Fail Faster Successfully
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