Cadenced Meetings

Stand-up

This happens every day at the same time. The daily stand-up is a short, daily meeting to discuss progress and identify blockers. The next questions highlight progress and help flag team blockers:

• What did I work on yesterday?

• What am I working on today?

• What issues are blocking me?

Sprint Planning

This happens every two weeks on Mondays. The purpose of sprint planning is to define what can be delivered in the sprint and how that work will be achieved. The sprint planning session kicks off the sprint by setting the agenda and focus.

In this meeting, we define:

• The What –  The product owner describes the objective(or goal) of the sprint and what backlog items contribute to that goal. The scrum team decides what can be done in the coming sprint and what they will do during the sprint to make that happen.

• The How – The development team plans the work necessary to deliver the sprint goal. Ultimately, the resulting sprint plan is a negotiation between the development team and product owner based on value and effort.

• The Who – The product owner defines the goal based on the value that they seek. The development team needs to understand how they can or cannot deliver that goal.

• The Inputs – A great starting point for the sprint plan is the product backlog as it provides a list of ‘stuff’ that could potentially be part of the current sprint. The team should also look at the existing work done in the increment and have a view to capacity.

• The Outputs – The most important outcome of the sprint planning meeting is that the team can describe the goal of the sprint and how it will start working toward that goal. This is made visible in the sprint backlog.

Sprint Review

This happens every two weeks before the sprint ends. Sprint reviews are not retrospectives. A sprint review is about demonstrating the hard work of the entire team: designers, developers, and the product owner. Team members gather around a desk for informal demos and describe the work they’ve done for that iteration. It’s a time to ask questions, try new features, and give feedback.

Sprint Retrospective

Scrum is a process of continuous improvement, and a retrospective is a time for teams to reflect on the opportunities to accomplish this.

The sprint retrospective is a recurring meeting dedicated to discussing what went well and what can be improved in a sprint. It also gives a chance to recover from a sprint and prepare for the next one.