This is only a guide, not the very definition of a process, everything mentioned here can and should be taken into consideration and ignored or replaced when necessary.
Scrum is an iterative framework to help developer teams maximising their productivity and the value of the products they deliver. This sounds fancy enough, but it just means that it tries to keep you away from distractions and help you avoid wasting effort on unnecessary things.
Scrum rituals are as follows:
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We run 2 week long sprints
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Each sprint starts on Monday, at the end of the Sprint Planning session. This is the meeting where we close and evaluate the previous sprint and kick the new one off.
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We run daily stand-ups.
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We have a bi-weekly Refinement session
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Sprint Retrospective meetings are on the last day of the sprint
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Team members should be present, other people can come too but not participate
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We should focus on three main questions:
- What have I achieved since the last stand-up?
- What am I working on currently?
- Is there anything blocking me from achieving my goal?
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The daily stand-up is not for problem solving, try to avoid going into fine details or solution proposals until the end
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Review previous sprint goal - was it achieved?
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Complete any remaining tickets, decide what to carry over to the next sprint and what to put back on the backlog
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Agree the sprint goal for the new sprint at the start of the meeting
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Review the balance of tickets proactively during the planning/refinement session
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Keep in mind the following when deciding how many story points to bring into the sprint:
- Who is on-call?
- Any holidays?
- Any all-day meetings/conferences?
- Any rotas?
- Anything else that might affect your velocity this sprint?
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Before starting the new sprint, remember to:
- Mark all tickets as ready for development
- Check all stories are pointed
- Check all tickets have epics
- Set the sprint goal
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Refer to the story template
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Get stories reviewed by another member of the squad before refinement to sense check
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Add a description for ‘dummies’
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If most of the refinement is done before the refinement session, there is less work to do in the meeting
- Meetings should start on time, without waiting for people
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State the objective of the meeting at the beginning of the meeting
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Take notes of the important details (and only those) during meetings, and re-read them out just before the end of the meeting. This helps with keeping people in the loop and avoiding misunderstandings
- A spike ticket should be raised for each unplanned incident so that we can keep track of distractions but no story points should be assigned to them to avoid an unwanted bias in delivered value metrics.