Scrum Ceremonies

Agile in general is so fluid that no one can say how to go about it but there are certain practices which when applied will make you or the team feel the difference of practicing the methodology.

Therefore, the absurd thought that Agile is comfort of doing what one wishes and what best suites is not only that but certain recommendations that promotes real value generation in software industry or any industry in general.

If someone bluntly wants to know that tell me what all process I should follow to begin with to reap benefits is something as below -

Daily Scrum Meeting — The purpose of the daily status meeting is to bring the team together at a predefined time, in a time-boxed manner, so that every development team member gets an opportunity share an update around the progress made towards achieving the Sprint goal, plan that he/she has for the day and impediments that is faced by the member, if any.

Duration — Time box it to maximum 15 min

Product Backlog Refinement — Small group review of the upcoming Sprint backlog (primarily) to refine the scope, discuss on prioritization, discuss on tech feasibility, uncover cross team dependencies, understand and refine business prioritization along with acceptance criteria.

• Product Manager to add stories with business use-cases and details;
• Elaborate expected outcome and acceptance criteria for UAT;
• Add and explain the value addition to business through different matrices that will get affected through delivery of the requirement;
• Prioritization of backlog in order of priority;

Sprint Planning Meeting I — Product Manager presents the Sprint backlog with entire development team to explain the expected deliverables of the Sprint. Explains the business requirement, business matrices and acceptance criteria of each of the requirement in Sprint backlog. Development team to understand the ask of the story and ask any related questions around business requirement.

Sprint Planning Meeting II : Development team regroups to discuss the tech solution against each of the requirement of Sprint backlog. Outcome of this meeting is that each requirement is broken down into logical subtask and estimated. It leads to projected estimate requirement for the Sprint backlog ; up to subtask level assignment within dev members.

• Story pointing for the Dev and QA effort required (would be added to already assigned story points for analysis)
• Explain the changes to be done to QA and the whole team

Duration — (SPM1 + SPM2) should last 2 times the length of the sprint (in hours). If Sprint is 2 weeks long, the Sprint Planning ceremony should last no longer than 4 hours.

Sprint Review/Demo —

Either, Development team presents the Sprint backlog developed, tested and UAT done items to Product Manager to get a sign-off for Production release;

OR, Product Manager present the development on behalf of the Scrum Team to business stakeholders before the release could be taken to Production as an increment;

Retrospective session — To be conducted at the end of every Sprint to analyze the activities conducted during Sprint execution. Applaud What Went Well, discuss Deltas a nd agree upon atleast two action items to be taken up at team level for over all improvement in self governance.

Duration — Maximum up to ~ No. of weeks * 1.5 (hrs.).

Sprint Kick-Off meeting — To be conducted at the start of every Sprint to review the readiness status of the Sprint backlog, get the available capacity of the team (considering any planned leaves), glance at previous Sprint velocity and project the deliverable velocity and capacity of the current Sprint, review that the Sprint backlog items are estimated and broken down at subtask level. Ensure that every development team member have got the required items/sprint executables assigned to them.

Duration — Maximum up to ~ No. of weeks * 0.75 (hrs.)

I have followed these ceremonies and have found it working to reap the benefits of consistent outcome with business value. That is what matters to the person investing money in the project. Imagine one says I need to build something and you/team starts giving some working prototype periodically. This is what you want and certainly the end users or investors want.

Hope you like the write up and able to relate to it. If you need some more insights feel free to drop in your views.