Learn About Agile
Scrum activities happen at particular points in the sprint cycle. These pages will guide you through setting up regular meetings for these activitieswith your team.
Prepare for daily meetings with the daily Scrum meeting. The “daily Scrum” is meant to be consistent – same place and time each day, preferably in the morning. Further, they are meant to be no longer than 15 minutes. The meeting is for the entire team, including the Scrum Master and product owner. It’s important that the meeting is more about status updates than problem solving, which should be solved with appropriate subgroups. Further, the status updates are not to inform the boss on who’s behind, but to keep team members committed to one other. It’s also a way for the Scrum Master to learn about impediments that need addressing.
The sprint planning meeting is another meeting for the entire team. In these, the product owner lays out the highest priorities of the product (enough for two sprints), and the team asks questions that will help break the big concepts into detailed tasks. The idea is to come away from the meeting with both a sprint goal (a short description of achievement goals) and a sprint backlog (list of product features to be delivered and the tasks to make that happen). It’s up to the team, not the product owner, to determine how much work they can do in the coming sprint.
In the sprint retrospective meeting, you reach a point when the Scrum team looks for ways to improve in the wake of a sprint. Once again, this is for the whole team, and can usually happen in about an hour. We recommend structuring the meeting around what the team should start doing, stop doing and continue doing. This is simple and effective, and can be customized to individual teams. The Scrum Master can facilitate and even ask for a vote on items brought up by the team.
The sprint review meeting discusses the actual product produced at the end of a sprint. This is the actual piece of software or product that can be demoed in an informal way. The final product is also measured against the original sprint goals. The overall goal is more important than getting to every product backlog item in the sprint.