Scrum Events

There are five events in a Scrum project:

• Sprint: Each Scrum project is a set of Sprints. A Sprint is a container for the four other events, development effort, and the maintenance of the Product Backlog.
• Sprint Planning: Sprint Planning is the first event inside a Sprint. The Scrum Team plans the items they are going to deliver in the Sprint and the way they will deliver them.
• Daily Scrum: The Development Team starts working on the objectives of the Sprint as soon as Sprint Planning is completed. During the Sprint, the Development Team holds a daily meeting (normally 15 minutes) to coordinate the work for the next 24 hours. This meeting is called the Daily Scrum.
• Sprint Review: Before the end of the Sprint, the Development Team reviews the outcome of the Sprint with the customer to receive feedback. The feedback is used to adjust the Product Backlog.
• Sprint Retrospective: After the Sprint Review and just before the Sprint is over, the Development Team holds an internal meeting to review the Sprint (lessons learned) and use it to improve the process in the next Sprint. This meeting is called Sprint Retrospective.

The four events inside the Sprint are designed to enable critical transparency, inspection, regularity, and adaptation. We prefer to use these predefined meetings with fixed objectives and timeboxes (maximum duration) instead of ad-hoc meetings, which have the potential to waste our time.

There is an essential concept in Agile methods, called timebox: a predefined maximum duration of time. In order to maximize productivity, all the Scrum events must be timeboxed. It helps everyone focus on the real problems, instead of going into too much unnecessary detail.

Scaling

There will be changes in the events when there are multiple teams working on the same project. The changes depend on the scaling framework (e.g. Nexus).

External Resources

• Scrum Guide, a definition of the Scrum framework by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
• Nexus Guide, a framework for scaling Scrum by Ken Schwaber et al.
• The Scrum Master Training Manual, a free ebook on Scrum, and the Professional Scrum Master™ (PSM™ I) exam
• Scrum Awareness, a free email course on Scrum framework