Scrum Simplified

• 2 weeks (10 days)
• Sprint Planning — 1st Monday
• Daily Standup — every weekday, except Sprint Planning and Sprint Retrospective days
• Grooming — every Thursday
• Sprint Retrospective — 2nd Friday

Terms

Sprint Planning. 1 hour. Who? Team engineers, team Designer(s), team QA, team Product Manager. Sprint Planning will be held at the beginning of every sprint. This meeting is where you define your Sprint Goal, the number of points that you are committing to complete for the sprint. You typically will have an idea of how many points you should commit to after considering the burn down chart, employee time-off, and any other potential factors that need to be considered. The tasks that will be added to this sprint are tasks that were already groomed and sized in previous grooming sessions. After you’ve determined an initial Sprint Goal estimate, the engineers will perform a Fist of Five, which is when each engineer displays a number of fingers (one through five) representing their confidence in reaching the Sprint Goal. If the engineers display 1’s and 2’s, remove tasks from the sprint and repeat the Fist of Five. I personally almost never display a 5, as you do not want to commit to something and not deliver to the stakeholders. You also want to be prepared for setbacks, edge cases, and mid-sprint emergencies. My highest confidence level for meeting the Sprint Goal is typically a 4 on a scale of 1 to 5. The sprint should start shortly after this meeting. It’s okay to make some final adjustments (close current sprint tickets, etc) before starting the sprint, however, the Product Manager is responsible for starting the sprint on the day of Sprint Planning shortly after Sprint Planning occurs.

Daily Standup. 15 minutes or less. Who? Team engineers, team Designer(s), team QA, team Product Manager. Quick team meeting where each team member gives an update on what they worked on yesterday, what they will be working on today, and whether or not they have any blockers.

Grooming. 1 hour or less. Who? Team engineers, team Designer(s), team QA, team Product Manager. Grooming will be held every Thursday. This meeting is where you take a look at the backlog and carefully go through each task and add Acceptance Criteria, Requirements, Designs, and sizing. Remember that each of these scrum rituals are timeboxed, that is especially important for grooming sessions as you probably have a great deal of tasks that need grooming but will only groom as many tasks that the allotted timebox warrants.

Sprint Retrospective. 1 hour. Who? Team engineers, team Designer(s), team QA, team Product Manager. Sprint Retrospective will be held at the end of every sprint. This meeting should be a celebration of the sprint. I’ve been with organizations that actually had pizza parties for these meetings. In this meeting you will anonymously list things that went well throughout the sprint, things that can be improved, and what action items may be necessary to implement. This meeting is also a safe place to anonymously voice concerns or feedback regarding anything at all. Management and stakeholders are typically not in any of these meetings, especially Sprint Retrospective.