Module 4 – The Scrum Events
This module introduces the five different events that happen in Scrum: Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, The Sprint, the Sprint Review and the Sprint Retrospective. This module is made up of Videos, followed by a quiz to help support your understanding.
- Sprint Planning
- The Daily Scrum
- The Sprint
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
The daily scrum is all about transparency in the scrum team and making sure that everyone knows what's happening during the sprint. The daily scrum, sometimes called a stand-up, is a team catch-up. It's time-boxed to 15 minutes, and it's held every day of the sprint. The daily scrum is held at the same time every day to reduce complexity, and so everyone knows that they can't make other commitments unless they'll be towards achieving the sprint goal. The daily scrum should be conducted face-to-face. Now this doesn't mean that everyone has to be in the same room, however. Digital meetings can be conducted. Just make sure that everyone has a webcam. One of the key values of scrum is openness. Ensuring that daily scrums happen face-to-face helps uphold that value. The dev team plans the work for the next day or until the next scrum. The daily scrum helps to optimize the probability that the development team will meet the sprint goal. Seeing what everyone is working on gives visibility to all of the progress on the product increment. The structure of the daily scrum is set by the dev team. Each member of the team typically needs to answer three questions. What did I do yesterday that helped reach the sprint goal? What will I do today to help reach the sprint goal? And is there anything stopping me from helping reach the sprint goal? The team will be able to see what progress is being made towards the sprint via the daily scrum. Understanding what everyone is working on helps provide clarity. The daily scrum should be no longer than 15 minutes. Given that, if there are things that need to be discussed in further detail, the appropriate members of the dev team can communicate within the scrum if they need to talk to one another in more detail. This sort of discussion to discuss, adapt, or replan the sprint normally happens immediately after the daily scrum with the relevant members of the dev team involved. Sometimes, others outside of the scrum team sit in on the daily scrum. The scrum master needs to ensure that they don't interrupt the scrum. Daily scrums improve communications. They eliminate other meetings, identify impediments to development so they can be removed, and they highlight and promote quick decision making and improve the development team's level of knowledge. This is a key meeting that follows the transparency, inspect and adapt the pillars of empiricism on which scrum is based on, as well as upholding the values of openness.
Paul Williams is a Senior Learning Consultant for QA, based in Manchester, UK. He is a member of the Agile, Lean & DevOps Trainer Team.