Agile Development Introduction - Ceremonies

Scrum - Ceremonies

A Scrum team consists of 5 main meetings

1. Sprint Grooming
2. Sprint Planning
3. Sprint Kickoff
4. Sprint Start
5. Sprint Demo & Retro

Sprint Grooming

After confirming that the candidate User Story is ready to enter into Sprint Planning, Scrum Master, Project Owner, and Tech Lead will first check the candidate User Story in Grooming, and will check the following key points:

• Is the requirement description of the Story clear?
• Is the expected output of the Story clear

Sprint Planning

After evaluating all User Stories for the next Sprint, divide them into executable Tasks and evaluate Story points.
The Scrum Master will be responsible for hosting this meeting, discussing with team members how each User Story should be divided into achievable Tasks, and giving each Task the corresponding Story Points. The most frequently criticized thing in this meeting is the meeting time. Because of how to complete a User Story, there will be different situations to consider from different perspectives. Therefore, the Scrum Master needs to clearly limit the scope of the discussion here to avoid System over-engineering and timing of delivering functionality. Excessive meetings and long meeting times are often the reasons why team members are seriously disgusted with Scrum.

Sprint Kickoff

Assign tasks to team members according to the team's development capacity and Feature priority.
It is very common that after the Planning is completed, the Tasks far exceed the development capacity that the team members can afford. At this time, you should discuss the choice of User Story with the Project Owner. It can be delivered appropriately and with high quality if it is hard put into the Sprint. After ensuring that the team members understand the content of the Task they are going to do, the sprint can start.

Sprint Start

Steady execution, completing tasks, and removing chores that disturb team members are the most important things for the Scrum Master at this time

⁠After the start of the Sprint, a Daily Standup meeting will be hosted at noon every day. It is called the Standup because I hope that the time for this daily synchronous progress meeting should be as short as possible (everyone knows it will end when their feet are sore)

⁠Standup meeting main points:

• what is everyone doing
• what is everyone going to do next
• Has anyone's Task been blocked by others (Block)

Usually, there will be many accidents in Sprint (the perfect Sprint does not exist), it may be the instability of the system or the change of requirements. At this time, the Scrum Master needs to assist in adjusting resources to ensure that all relevant people know what is expected. The output will be affected, and adjustments will be made during the next Grooming.

Sprint demo and retro

The focus of this meeting is to show the completed Feature and discuss what parts of the process need to be improved
At the end of each Sprint, it is worth celebrating🍻. Every successfully delivered feature is attributed to the contribution of team members. Appropriate encouragement is a very important part of team morale. In addition, in this meeting, there will also be discussed:

1. what is doing well should continue
2. what could be better
3. what should be avoided

Revise Scrum according to this conclusion and then we go back to Grooming and continue to start the next Sprint cycle.

Why are there these meetings? Let's talk about the various outputs in the Sprint