Scrum Events (or Scrum Ceremonies) are defined to “inspect and adapt” the overall Sprint activities. All Scrum Events are time-boxed. Below are the four Scrum events:
Sprint Planning: This event is time-boxed at 4 hours for a two-week Sprint, and 8 hours for a four-week Sprint. This Scrum event happens at the start of a Sprint where the team identifies the Product Backlog items to work on in the upcoming sprint.
For more information about Sprint Planning, click here.
Daily Scrum: This event is also called as Daily Standup. This is a 15-minute time-boxed event (regardless of length of Sprint). The Developers discuss progress towards the Sprint goal, any impediments and synchronise their daily work activities. They plan their work until the next Daily Scrum.
For more information about Daily Scrum, click here.
Sprint Review: The Sprint Review is time-boxed at 2 hours for a 2 week Sprint and 4 hours for a four-week Sprint. This event happens at the end of the Sprint. This is the feedback event where the Developers give a demo of the work in the Sprint, and the Scrum Team and the other stakeholders inspect the increment. The team considers if any if any changes are needed and adds them to the Product Backlog for future deliveries.
For more information about Sprint Review, click here.
Sprint Retrospective: This event happens immediately after the Sprint Review and it is time-boxed at 1.5 hours for a two-week Sprint (and 3 hours for a four-week Sprint). This helps Scrum Teams to reflect upon their deliveries in the Sprint and identify any opportunities for improvement and plan for it in the next or future Sprints.
For more information about Sprint Retrospective, click here.
Sprints are iterative, short interval, fixed time-boxed periods where a Scrum Team accomplishes the Sprint goal by completing a defined set of work, and customers and stakeholders get the sense of the Product as it grows incrementally. The incremental delivery of work from Sprints ensures that the Product development goes through “inspect and adapt” cycles frequently and effectively, and helps the Scrum Team successfully achieve the overall Product vision.
Sprint Planning is the first Scrum event that kicks off the Sprint.
Once the Product Backlogs items are ordered and are available to pull from, the Sprint Planning meeting is a collaborative activity between Scrum Team members (and the stakeholders) to identify “what” to deliver, and “how” to deliver it in the Sprint.
Velocity is about the amount of work that has been finished by the team in a given sprint. Agile team uses “Velocity” for planning the subsequent sprints. This is a measure that helps teams to identify how the teams were performing in the past sprints and how much work can be completed in the future sprint. Velocity is computed by adding up all the story points which are moved to “done” status in a sprint.
Usually team’s velocity is an estimate calculated by taking average velocity from the last 3 sprints to determine the future sprint’s velocity.
During the daily scrum meeting, the team members respond to three Daily Scrum questions. They are extremely effective in establishing the self-organising team and leads to the collaboration of team members to know what each other works and also resolve any problems disrupting the work progress.
The Daily Scrum questions answered by the team members are:
What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
Are there any blockers or impediments in your way?
The Sprint Retrospective event helps the team to reflect on the recent sprint they have finished. The team appreciates their efforts while also discusses on the improvement aspects which might get into the Product Backlog for future work.
Here are some common Agile Sprint Retrospective questions to ask:
What went well?
What didn’t go well?
What should we have done better?
What have we learned?
What should we improve?
What should we start doing?
What should we stop doing?
What should we continue doing?