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Agile Sprint Ceremonies

What is it?

Agile sprint ceremonies are recurring team meetings that create intentional spaces for communication and collaboration. By having the meetings with a recurring cadence, we ensure that we are revisiting key areas for collaboration on a regular basis no longer than the length of our delivery sprint.

We recommend (as does Kent Beck in the book Extreme Programming Explained 2nd Edition) using a 1-week sprint structure that begins on Monday and ends on Friday. This standard timescale lets you plan on a Monday with a goal of accomplishing work by the end of the week. At the end of the week, you are able to reflect on the work accomplished before using the weekend as a “reset.”

The key ceremonies within an agile sprint are:

  • Iteration Planning
  • Standup
  • Stakeholder Demo
  • Team Retrospective

Iteration Planning

Have a meeting at the beginning of your sprint to plan work for the iteration. Product owners pick and prioritize an iteration’s worth of user stories to implement during the sprint. Team members align on the work to be done, estimate the stories and set a sprint goal. At the end of the sprint, during the retrospective, the team should reflect on the sprint goal, if it was achieved, and what led to it’s achievement or lack thereof.

Standup

Have a brief meeting daily with the entire team to foster communication, connect team members, ensure alignment, and identify any impediments. The word “standup” comes from the idea that participants should stand up during this meeting - it should be energetic, quick, and focused. Standing helps keep the meeting concise and to the point by promoting energy and blood flow, which enhances alertness and engagement.

Stakeholder Demo

A stakeholder demo, also known as a sprint review or sprint demo is a meeting with the delivery team, product owner and key project stakeholders. The team presents work completed within the sprint to stakeholders to showcase progress, collect feedback, and ensure alignment to stakeholder goals. Having a space to meet with stakeholders also provides a forum to talk about any risks/blockers to the project's success.

Team Retrospective

Hold a meeting at the end of your sprint to give the team a forum to reflect on how they are working, why they are working, and analyze what is making them succeed and fail. Retrospectives expose opportunities for improvement and allow teams to learn how to work better together. Teams should implement changes and/or run experiments to iterate on how to work together for future sprints.

Why Do Them?

These ceremonies, when practiced correctly, improve a team’s ability to respond to change, improve feedback loops, unlock continuous improvement, and foster better communication and collaboration.

  • Iteration Planning: By planning in small increments (a week at a time), it enables the team to re-evaluate what is most important in any given sprint and incorporate those aspects into planning. As a team learns more about their product and the environment which their product lives in, they are dynamically able to incorporate that feedback into their next planning session. This reduces risk, reduces wasted effort planning for the wrong things, and promotes the ability to respond to change around newly learned information.
  • Standup: Daily team standups allow every team member to stay connected on progress and impediments. Standups connect members of the team so they may collaborate outside of standup to solve challenges. By holding them daily, we ensure we never go more than a day without talking about project blockers and key updates.
  • Stakeholder Demo: Stakeholder demos keep key members outside of the delivery team engaged and their feedback keeps the team aligned to business/mission needs. By engaging weekly, teams can ensure they are in sync with project stakeholders and ensure risks are being radiated in a timely manner.
  • Team Retrospective: Retrospectives help teams continuously improve how they work together week over week. It is often said that if there is only one agile practice to bring to your team, the retrospective is the most critical. All other practices should follow suit from a process of reflecting on work and continuously looking to improve on how to work.

By doing these meetings with a routine cadence, we ensure that each of these areas gets attention every week and is a key contributing factor to giving a team agility - the ability to pivot as needed when responding to change.

A common misunderstanding with sprint ceremonies…

We should never say, “We do agile” just because we hold space for these meetings. While revisiting these ceremonies every week can bring greater agility to your organization, they are not a silver bullet. To bring true agility to an organization, we must examine all facets of the software design and development process and find the bottlenecks preventing tight feedback loops. This means examining how quickly you can get software into production, how frequently you can get feedback from end users, and your ability to change a plan as you learn new information. The retrospective can serve as a great tool for examining these areas and making continuous improvements.

Each of these ceremonies in of themselves is a practice on their own, and we should ask ourselves if we are actually being effective in the practice of each or if we are going through the motions. Going through the motions will not actually bring greater agility. Reflect on the outcomes and the why behind these ceremonies and ask if they are serving their purpose.

You can also practice all of these ceremonies well but doing them over a longer timescale (e.g. a month instead of a week) means you are adding risk by extending what could otherwise be a shorter feedback loop. We recommend a week as a good balance of having a short feedback loop with enough of a timescale to make forward progress.