Daily stand ups – It is essential to have this daily event in the scrum organization which allows the team to discuss what has been progressing and if there are any challenges to overcome.
Backlog grooming – This is a sprint ceremony that allows the scrum team to discuss (groom) on the user stories for next sprint. Sometimes the product owner also runs through the current sprint user stories to check how many will be brought over to next sprint. This is to estimate how many new user stories can be accommodated for next sprint.
Sprint planning – The planning happens on the first day of the new sprint and is usually a session to agree on the user stories that can be taken up by the scrum team (provided that the story points and team capacity has been estimated beforehand). There are instances where the user stories are not able to complete grooming within the time allocated and hence may need to continue in sprint planning.
Sprint demo and review – Demo by the team to the end users allows for a review of the progress of the sprint and what been built so far. The benefit of this is to enable users to feedback on the experiences (UI, UX and product journey).
Sprint retrospective – During sprint retrospective, the entire team including key stakeholders will discuss with the team on the progress of the sprint, what was great, not so great and also what may be adopted as future practices.
What are the pros and cons of having this sprint ceremonies ?
Pros : Allows the team to have the opportunity to ask questions and clarify on the stories and acceptance criteria. Provides the individual team members to chance to look at what’s ahead and plan their development effort ahead of the next sprint.
Cons : Lots of meeting and discussion time creeps into development time. Hence, in most cases, team capacity for the sprint needs to take into account the overhead of this non development efforts (estimated around 10 – 20% of total capacity and then some for holidays and annual leave).
Are all these ceremonies necessary ?
Absolutely yes. The reason is that it inspires the team members to think ahead and also analyze the stories acceptance criteria before the new sprint starts.
However, in most circumstances, the questions asked by developers are minimal and in majority of situations, complications and blockers are only discovered during development.
What are the drawbacks ?
Too much time maybe required for sprint ceremonies especially in two weeks sprints, possibly due to the enormity of some stories. Often than not, the team members can sometimes comment of fatigue from such sessions held over long periods of time especially in an online setting (2 – 3 hours).
Even if product owner is experienced, doesn’t mean the individual team members understand every nook and cranny of the product so there could be understanding gaps in the middle of sprint that needs to be clarified. The team is encouraged as much as possible to raise questions for clarity during the sprint ceremonies.
So maybe your next question is what do we do in backlog grooming ? or .. how do we start the ceremony ? or what needs to be prepared ?
I will provide a checklist in my future posts so please stay tuned 🙂
Disclaimer: What I am sharing is purely from my point of view and does not reflect anyone else’s. What I present in my posts doesn’t necessarily mean tat it is applicable to your work, organization and culture. Would love to hear from you if you have any different opinions or feedback.
