Let’s talk Scrum Ceremonies

Traditionally, software development teams are hierarchical and development process is linear which is making it difficult to respond to change and make teams less flexible. But with Agile methodology, its all about to change. Its a whole new ball game in which changes are welcomed and break the hierarchy to empower teams to be more flexible and more efficient.

One of the four main values of Agile is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. To make this sentence a living process throughout the product development ceremonies are introduced in Scrum framework.

Scrum, which follows agile methodologies, splits the work into Sprints. Each sprint has a specific time period and a goal to accomplish. But no one sets the goals for the teams except themselves and that’s the point. How can teams be more effective through self-organization?

Welcome to Scrum Ceremonies:

These ceremonies are generally known as Scrum events or meetings. Four events happen in a sprint, namely:
1. Sprint Planning,
2. Daily Scrum meeting
3. Sprint review meeting
4. Sprint retrospective meeting

Sprint Planning Meeting:
To start a sprint, the team must have an objective or a goal that could add some value to the product. To set this goal the product owner, scrum master and the development team call for a meeting and pick high priority product backlog items. The scrum master’s facilitate the meeting. The product owner describes the product goal and answers questions from the development team about execution and acceptance criteria. The developers the final say in how much of the high-priority work it can accomplish during the sprint. The developers start to work on the goals and be prepared for the next meeting.

Daily Scrum Meeting:
The development team meets everyday of the sprint for few minutes to track their progress towards the sprint goal. In this meeting three questions are answered
1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?
The main objective of this meeting is to address any difficulties and insure everyone on track to wards sprint goals.

Sprint Review Meeting:
This meeting happens at the end of the sprint to inspect the developed functionality. Attendees of this meeting are the product owner, scrum master, developers and interested stake holders. The objective of this meeting is check the given task meets the Definition of Don if yest move it to the product increment artifact. If not move it to the next sprint. The team takes the feedback and adjust the product backlog accordingly.

Sprint Retrospective Meeting:
After successfully completion of the sprint the scrum team meets once again to gather feedback and find way to improvements for the next sprint. In this meeting three questions are asked
1. What went right this sprint?
2. What went wrong? And
3. What could we do differently next time for improvements?

And one more kind of meeting but not a formal event that in Scrum

Sprint Backlog Refinement Meeting:
This meeting is also known as product grooming meeting. In this meeting the teams works on product backlog items clean and placed according the priority. The teams discusses and helps product owner groom the backlog items until the reach to definition of ready so that these backlog items can be moved to next sprint.