Scrum Meeting

As product and market needs become more advanced, product development processes have had to catch up. To stay competitive, the modern product development team must be highly adaptable, capable of consistent and progressive iteration, and ready to respond to sudden changes.

To adapt to these needs, many firms have adopted agile software development frameworks in order to sustain these more advanced products. Among the most popular of these frameworks is Scrum. In this glossary article, we take a look at one of its key components, the scrum meeting.

What is a Scrum Meeting?

A scrum meeting is a type of meeting in the Scrum framework, which takes place during scrum sprints. Each scrum meeting has a different objective. All members of the team who are involved in the development process attend the meeting.

The most common type of scrum meeting is the “daily standup” or “daily scrum”. As its name suggests, it takes place every day. This is the type of meeting that is usually referred to by the general term “scrum meeting.”

What is the Purpose of a Scrum Meeting?

Though there are different types of scrum meetings, each one aims to align the development team on the status and requirements of the project. The entire scrum team attends scrum meetings, including:

• The Scrum master, who facilitates the scrum environment, leading and coaching the Scrum team and monitoring sprint progress;
• The Product owner, who manages the entire product project and adjusts high-level goals according to customer or market needs;
• The whole Development team. 

What are The Five Scrum Ceremonies?

The heart of the Scrum framework is the scrum sprint. There are four unique types of scrum meetings, also called scrum ceremonies, that support sprints. Each of which plays a different role in helping the team complete the sprint. Together with the sprint itself, there are five scrum ceremonies that you should know about in order to successfully implement Scrum.

Sprint

The first scrum ceremony is the scrum sprint itself. The sprint is a fixed time period, usually a maximum of one month. During this, a development team aims to complete a certain amount of work or achieve certain milestones.

Sprint Planning

The first type of scrum meeting is sprint planning, which takes place before the succeeding sprint. During sprint planning, all members of the team work together to identify how to approach the product’s needs, and what can be accomplished over the next sprint.

In sprint planning, the product owner presents the product backlog. It represents all-new features, feature revisions, bug fixes, and other changes to the product. The scrum master and development team will work together to decide which items in the product backlog can be completed.

Sprint planning helps keep everyone on the same page. Not only as to what the project requirements are, but also what the priorities of the project are. It also allows the scrum master to assign roles to each member of the development team.

Daily Scrum

The daily scrum meeting takes place every day during each sprint. It’s also called a “daily standup.”

In a nutshell, the daily scrum meeting is a time for each member of the team to answer the following questions:

• What did I do yesterday?
• What am I doing today?
• Are there any blockers or obstacles preventing me from making progress with or completing my tasks?

The purpose of the daily scrum is to help the team identify any issues in real-time as they arise. This allows you to quickly react to them before you spend too much time on pursuing a flawed direction.

The scrum meeting is not a problem-solving meeting. Each team member reports their progress, tasks, and obstacles to the rest of the scrum team, and then they can work together to address any obstacles after the meeting.

In most cases, the daily scrum meeting is a maximum of only 15 minutes. Many development teams have their daily standups in the morning or at the start of each workday. However, they can actually take place at any time of the day. What’s important is that the daily scrum takes place at the exact same time and place every day to establish consistency.

Sprint Review

The sprint review is held after the completion of the sprint itself. During the review, each team member basically shows off what they’ve done over the last sprint, whether it be bug fixes or new features. The rest of the attendees provide praise and encouragement to boost team morale, as well as offer constructive feedback to help improve their colleagues’ work.

Sprint Retrospective

The sprint retrospective is similar to the sprint review. Except instead of reviewing what each team member did, the entire sprint as a process is evaluated. The entire Scrum team discusses what worked and what didn’t work, praising positive things like effective leadership moments and fast completion times while identifying negative outcomes, such as organizational issues and missed deadlines.

Scrum retrospectives help uncover difficulties that team members had with the sprint planning, and can inform future sprint planning discussions, as well as the overall management of the project moving forward.

The Scrum meeting: A key component of the agile environment

Scrum meetings (and the scrum process as a whole) help every stakeholder maintain a holistic view of the entire product development process as it unfolds, and they allow team members to review their progress with careful consideration at every stage. It also ensures that bad news travels fast, allowing the team to rapidly address issues that might have otherwise compounded undetected without Scrum-style reporting.

When you implement Scrum, and have each of the scrum ceremonies interwoven into your product development cycle, it can help your team adhere to agile values. You’ll have a product team that’s adaptable, dependable, and supports each other whenever they can to produce better results all around.