Toward Scrum, part 7: Scrum Meetings

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Russell Bateman
December 2018

There are 5 essential meetings that exist in formal Scrum. To some degree, there is a chicken-and-egg aspect to last and first in this list.

  1. Sprint planning
  2. Daily stand-up
  3. Sprint review
  4. Sprint retrospective
  5. Backlog grooming or refinement

Sprint planning

Attendees

The entire team including the product manager/owner and the scrummaster.

Purpose

Planning the sprint has a number of goals including developing a realistic sprint backlog, defining the highest priority tasks. Time should be spent in explaining the backlog items, especially to more junior members of the team.

Sometimes this meeting is split into two with a middle part accomplished between times by the scrum team members:

  1. Story exposition.
  2. Task break-down.
  3. Story acceptance.

The poker cards are used in this meeting. In some implementations of Scrum, a sprint goal is stated.

The meeting ends with an expression of commitment, the fist of five (or fewer) fingers symbolizing commitment.

Daily stand-up

Attendees

The entire team including the product manager/owner and the scrummaster. Optionally, chickens may attend such as end-users and interested owners of other, perhaps related products.

Purpose

Discussed at length elsewhere in this tutorial, this meeting it typically time-boxed to 15 minutes. If it can't meet this restriction, it may be a sign that the team is too large. Extra and even crucial discussions and problem-solving should be handled in a "meeting after the meeting" or "parking-lot discussion."

As noted elsewhere, what's handled is strictly limited to each member (pigs only) answering three questions:

  1. What did you accomplish yesterday?
  2. What are you working on today?
  3. Are there any impediments to forward progress?

Sprint review (the demonstration)

Attendees

The entire team including the product manager/owner and the scrummaster, the QA team (if not part of the organization's Scrum team), chickens such as end-users and interested owners of other, perhaps related products, potentially even customers.

It may not be suitable that some attendees attend every aspect of this meeting, but only the product demonstrations.

Purpose

The objective is to demonstrate the new functionality in the product and what has been achived over the sprint. Performance is measured against the original sprint goals.

Sprint retrospective

Attendees

The entire team including the product manager/owner and the scrummaster, no others (no chickens).

Purpose

This meeting belongs exclusively to the pigs and has the fundamental pupose of reviewing what went right and, especially, what went wrong during a sprint and its relationship to making future sprints successful.

It is most emphatically not about what didn't get finished or what should have been in the sprint except in the sense of answering the question of what's broken in our implementation of Scrum that made us fail in finishing what we signed up to do or why we failed to recognize something that should have been part of our sprint but was not.

The spring retrospective is about process and not about the product in any way.

Backlog grooming or refinement

Attendees

The product manager/owner, team leads and possibly the scrummaster.

Purpose

The purpose of this meeting is to do work that will shorten sprint planning by answering as many questions as possible about planning the next sprint including prioritizing the backlog, converting epics (if epics are used) to stories, making those stories understandable and adding new work to the backlog.

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