Improve your Scrum Ceremonies

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 As agile practitioners, we must regularly reflect on how to become more effective and adjust our behavior accordingly (Agile principle #12.) As the saying goes, "anything worth doing is worth doing well."

Given the Scrum framework leverages many ceremonies as part of its framework, examining the effectiveness of those ceremonies is a great place to start. When evaluating the effectiveness of our Scrum framework, I recommend considering how well our activities align to the 3 pillars of Scrum; Transparency, Inspection, and Adaption. 

In the diagram above, I have listed, by ceremony, habits that help and habits that hurt the ceremony align to each of the 3 Scrum principles. Below I will provide additional commentary to help you ensure that your ceremonies are as effective as possible. 

Daily Scrum

 
In general, when it comes to fostering an effective Daily Scrum, teams should remain mindful that the purpose of the Daily Scrum is to facilitate teamwork and collaboration on the team and not to provide a status report to your Scrum Master. 

If a team member quickly rattles off ID #s from Jira or laments that they will be in meetings again today, do you know how to help them? Your team knows that you are working, we don't need for you to prove it, but we do need enough information so that we can recognize how your work will impact our own work so that we can collaborate. Speaking specifically when answering the three questions of a Daily Scrum is the best way to foster transparency during the Daily Scrum. 

Using the Daily Scrum to encourage team members to review your work is a wonderful way to prioritize Inspection. Consider saying, "Yesterday I adjusted I added the gift option to the checkout screen and updated the test environment. It is ready for the team to take a look" instead of "Yesterday I worked on the gift option." While you may have updated the ticket to show that you did complete the gift option ticket and move it to the test environment, not all your teammates will take the initiative to look in the system to see what has changed in the application, but they will all be happy to know there is new functionality for them to inspect. 

Identifying impediments is a major function of the Daily Scrum so ensuring your team Adapts accordingly is critical. If you are multitasking while you wait for your chance to speak, you will not realize when you need to adapt to help your team. If your team does not make plans for how to adapt to an impediment, your team will not likely adapt and overcome. To ensure that your team Adapts to impediments, the team should assign an owner to each impediment. Deciding the urgency required, the key stakeholders, and how the owner should follow up with the team will help ensure the team is able to adapt. If everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible. 

 
Sprint Planning

In general, when it comes to fostering an effective Sprint Planning ceremony, teams remain mindful that the purpose of Sprint Planning is for the team to work together to decide what value they can create during the next Sprint. Sprint Planning is typically the longest and most intense Scrum ceremony. 

Clear ticket titles/names and well-constructed User Stories are two important ways the team can help ensure transparency. If stakeholders do not understand the value the team has committed to delivering in a sprint, there is no Transparency. A good ticket title/name gives context and specificity to the work to be performed. The titles/names should be specific enough so that no two appear to be the same. The same sentiment applies to User Stories; if all the team's User Stories read the same, it will be difficult for stakeholders to understand what the team is working on.

To enable Inspection, the team should be examining the software during the ceremony. The intent here is not to evaluate solutions but to bring the User Stories to life. Inspection of the software helps ensure that the entire team understands what the Users need and the intended value of each ticket. Teams will also want to take care that their tickets facilitate Inspection by refraining from including design/requirements-only tickets. Design/Requirements-only tickets do not result in a shippable deliverable, which is the goal of each Sprint, and worse, they delay the inspection process.

For a team to remain Adaptable, the entire team must be empowered to use Sprint Planning to decide what should be accomplished during the Sprint. The team needs to consider their most recent Inspections and the most recent environmental and technological changes/impacts/risks. Having the backlog pre-organized into Sprints prohibits Adaptability and should be avoided. The best teams will take a moment to reflect upon and identify environmental changes that should be considered when planning activities for the next Sprint.