5 Scrum events and ceremonies

By SP Doctor in Project Management on December 18, 2020July 6, 2022

Scrum events and ceremonies – this is my third article as part of my scrum learning course, today I have chosen what are events and ceremonies are available in the scrum project, here some people would say 4 and some would say 5, some even say 6 scrum events. From my practical experience, I would go with 5 events in the scrum – being a scrum master role, I can say there are 5 events in scrum methodology, and many people might have a different number. So, I will explain the 5 scrum events and ceremonies.

Table of Contents

Key Highlights: Scrum events and ceremonies tutorials

What are the Scrum Events?
What is Sprint scrum?
What happens in the Sprint Planning meeting?
Who attends Sprint Planning?
What is the duration of the Sprint planning meeting?
What happens in the daily standup meeting?
Who attends the Daily Scrum – standup meeting?
What is the duration of the daily standup meeting?
What happens in the Sprint Grooming meeting?
What is the duration of the Sprint Grooming meeting?
Who attends Sprint Grooming?
What happens in the Sprint Review meeting?
Who attends the Sprint Review?
What happens in the Sprint Retrospective meeting?
Who should attend a Sprint Retrospective?
What is the duration of the Sprint Retrospective meeting?

What are the 5 Scrum events and ceremonies?

Below are the scrum events:

Sprint Planning
Daily Standup
Sprint Grooming
Sprint Review
Sprint Retrospective
The Sprint

Note:

In the above list, “the Sprint” is not the type of meeting rather it is a defined process that teams follow – in that process all other types of meetings mentioned above like Sprint Planning, Daily Standup, Grooming, Review, and Retrospective are followed. Some people have a different opinion on this, as per them “Sprint itself is an event in Scrum”
Some teams combine the Sprint Review and Retrospective together, and some organize separately, in this case, the number of scrum events might be different – the number would be either 4 or 5.

What is sprint and scrum in agile methodology?

In simple, we can say the sprint in scrum is a set of user stories or tasks planned for two to four weeks, it depends on the team, some team follows two weeks Sprint and some follow four weeks. Sprint should have a goal to deliver a product, in general, that should be the objective of Sprint.

Sprint planning meeting in agile

The sprint planning meeting is one of the meetings or events in a scrum that takes place on the first day of the sprint, the main agenda of this meeting is to plan the sprint user stories (tasks) for the next defined period (2 to 4 weeks, depending on the team).

Scrum events and ceremonies, sprint Planning Meeting in scrum — Sprint Planning Meeting in a scrum

What happens in the Sprint Planning meeting?

The main agenda, of the sprint planning meeting, is used to plan the tasks for the defined period, two to four weeks, it depends on the team.

As we know scrum is discipline-oriented, so we just can’t plan the tasks blindly, we need to follow certain guidelines or rules.

I will highlight those guidelines here in order:

Clean up previous sprint user stories and tasks.
Update the team velocity and leave details in the capacity planner, this data could be copied from the previous sprint.
Go to the analytic tab from the backlog view, and get the last n sprint average velocity, where n could be any number from 3 to 10 or even more. The intention behind this is, how many user stories the team has delivered over the last few sprints. So, that product owner or scrum master can get the number. For example, in the last 10 Sprint team has delivered 50 story points. Now, we got the average story points number.
Now, go to the Backlog view, and from the right side pane, enable the planning toggle.
Then, at the top ribbon just above the backlog view enter the number 50.
Immediately, down to the view, we can see a line which means where the line got drawn, that we can plan the user stories as the backlog has lots of user stories, so having the line drawn is very important.
In order to get the correct line drawn, all user stories and tasks should be estimated upfront from the top order.
Generally, user stories get estimated during the grooming meeting and the scrum master estimates the tasks for those user stories along with the other team members before going to the planning meeting with the product owner. Having said that, if user stories or tasks team is not able to estimate due to the lack of clarity, the team can discuss this with the product owner in the planning meeting and estimate it.
Once all these discussions and estimations are done with the product owner, now the product owner will prioritize the order of user stories.
Finally, the product owner will drag all user stories to the current planned Sprint whose sum of story points should not cross 50.
Now, all planned items (user stories and tasks) have been assigned to Sprint Backlog.
Now onwards Sprint is on.

Who attends sprint planning meeting?

Sprint planning involves the entire Scrum Team which means the development team, product owner, and Scrum Master.

What is the duration of the Sprint planning meeting?

It depends on various factors, like the team size, and the number of story points planning to deliver. However, for 8 members of the team, we can plan for 2 hours Sprint planning meeting.

Daily standup meeting in scrum

The daily standup meeting is one of the events or meetings in the scrum which take place every day.

What happens in daily standup meeting?

It is the meeting about the quick catch-up of the sprint progress. The format of the standup meeting is as below:

What you worked yesterday?
What you are going to work on today?
What is the plan for tomorrow?
Mention if you have any impediments.
Mention if there is any deviation from the actual plan of your tasks.

Each team member in a team should update the above.

For example,

“Yesterday I was working on getting the SharePoint list data from the postman tool”, “Today, I am working on updating the list item using the postman tool”, and “Tomorrow, I will test the postman tool query, and deploy it in the production.” And, I have no impediments, all tasks are going as planned.

Example of impediment:

“I am facing an issue to get connected SharePoint API call from the postman tool, it seems there is a network connectivity issue in my laptop, it seems the firewall is blocking to access SharePoint API, the IT team is working on that, hence the planned task is getting little deviated from the actual plan.”

Who attends the daily standup meeting?

The mandatory participants at the Daily Scrum are the development team. The ScrumMaster typically attends but is optional. The product owner is invited but doesn’t have to attend.

What is the duration of daily standup meeting?

The standard set by scrum organization is 15 minutes – the meeting should not go beyond its time. The meeting should be very concise – if you need more time technical details, you may schedule one more meeting for only with the required team members, not with all. This is one of the reasons why this meeting was named standup – as the name implies, it does not mean one should stand and talk, the intention of this naming is the meeting should be short and descriptive.

Note:

Some teams maintain MOM (minutes of the meeting) and some don’t.

Sprint grooming meeting in scrum

The sprint grooming meeting is one of the meetings or events in a scrum that takes place after the sprint planning and before the sprint review meeting – there is no fixed defined day for this but many of the scrum masters, and product owners keep this meeting in the middle of the sprint.

What happens in a backlog grooming session?

There are two main agendas for the Sprint Grooming meeting – 1. Quick catch-up of the ongoing sprint, and 2. Discussion about the new requirement and refine the backlog.

First few minutes, each team member of the teams give their individual task update to the product owner, then the product owner moves his focus to the backlog – where he/She will explain if the product owner added any new user story to the backlog and asks estimation in terms of a story point to the team, then the product owner tries to drill thru as much as he/she can, based on the order and priority and will refine the backlog items, and will keep things ready for the next sprint planning meeting.

What is the duration of backlog refinement meeting?

It is the same as a sprint planning meeting – it depends on various factors, like the team size, and the number of story points planning to deliver. However, for 8 members of the team, we can plan for 2 hours Sprint planning meeting.

Who attends sprint grooming meeting?

Sprint Grooming meeting involves the entire Scrum Team which means the development team, product owner, and Scrum Master.

Sprint review meeting in scrum

The sprint review meeting is one of the meetings or events in a scrum that takes place at the end of the sprint on the last day.

What should happen in the sprint review / demo meeting?

It is the delivery of the sprint – each team member in a team will demonstrate their deliverable to the product owner and team what they had been working on in the sprint.

Who attends the Sprint Review meeting?

Sprint Review meeting involves the entire Scrum Team which means the development team, product owner, and Scrum Master.

Sprint retrospective meeting

It is the last event or meeting in a sprint – it happens after the sprint review meeting, here some of the product owners conduct this meeting as a separate or some of them just continue in the same sprint delivery or review meeting, they just take it lightly, right after the sprint review meeting – they just spend sometimes maybe 15 to 30 minutes depends on the team size to discuss the retro agenda.

What happens in sprint retrospective meeting?

It is the meeting where the team looks and introspects about what went well and what didn’t go well. Before this meeting, the product owner creates a retrospective board for that said sprint – where each team member in a team should contribute by writing what went well and what didn’t go well in the retro board. Then product owner discusses those retro points with the team – and creates a work item as an action in terms of writing a user story in the product backlog, in case we have any “What didn’t go well” item on the retro board.

Notes:

Here one thing is notable – most of the team members write about what went well but fear writing any negative points in the “What didn’t go well” section. However, this is not correct, while we write something in the “What didn’t go well” section, we should not take that as a negative side, rather we should consider how we can do better in the next sprint – actually, this is the purpose behind this, the product owner always expects how we can do better if something was wrong in the previous sprint – in the eye of the product owner this is just improvement process, no blame game here. 🙂
So, feel free to add your contribution both in the “What didn’t go well” and “What went well” sections.
Don’t forget to appreciate or applaud the name who helped you to achieve your tasks in the previous sprint, this improves the spirit of working in a team, and you will get more help when need something in the next sprint.

Who should participate in sprint retrospective meeting?

Sprint retrospectives are for the Scrum team, which would include the development team, ScrumMaster, and product owner.

What is the duration of the Sprint Retrospective meeting (Scrum events and ceremonies)?

It depends on the team size however for 6-8 members of the team – it can be done in 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Summary: Scrum events and ceremonies

Thus, in this article, we have learned the below with respect to various events or meetings in the scrum model:

What are the Scrum Events?
What is Sprint scrum?
What happens in the Sprint Planning meeting?
Who attends Sprint Planning?
What is the duration of the Sprint planning meeting?
What happens in the daily standup meeting?
Who attends the Daily Scrum – standup meeting?
What is the duration of the daily standup meeting?
What happens in the Sprint Grooming meeting?
What is the duration of the Sprint Grooming meeting?
Who attends the Sprint Grooming meeting?
What happens in the Sprint Review meeting?
Who attends the Sprint Review meeting?
What happens in the Sprint Retrospective meeting?
Who should attend a Sprint Retrospective?
What is the duration of the Sprint Retrospective meeting?

5 Scrum events and ceremonies

Key Highlights: Scrum events and ceremonies tutorials

What are the 5 Scrum events and ceremonies?