AGILE - Ceremonies

Agile Methodology

The Agile methodology doesn’t tell you to stick to a set of prescribed steps or processes. It emphasizes adapting to the needs of your team, customer, and the changes in your environment and project requirements. The goal of Agile is to produce working results in a way that’s repeatable and continuous. 

In practical terms, agile software development methodologies are all about delivering small pieces of working software quickly to improve customer satisfaction. These methodologies use adaptive approaches and teamwork to focus on continuous improvement.

Different Agile Ceremonies are: -

Sprint: 

A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work. Sprints are at the very heart of scrum and agile methodologies, and getting sprints right will help your agile team ship better software with fewer headaches. User stories to be done in short period of time.

The aim of a sprint is to make progress against the product goal. So, the scrum team determines and agrees to a consistent duration for completing work. Most sprints range from two to four weeks — but should not be longer than one month.

Refinement: 

Backlog refinement (formerly known as backlog grooming) is when the product owner and some, or all, of the rest of the team review items on the backlog to ensure the backlog contains the appropriate items, that they are prioritized, and that the items at the top of the backlog are ready for delivery. Select user story from backlog to be refined. Happens before start of sprint.

“Product Backlog refinement is the act of adding detail, estimates, and order to items in the Product Backlog. This is an ongoing process in which the Product Owner and the Development Team collaborate on the details of Product Backlog items. During Product Backlog refinement, items are reviewed and revised.

The goal of refinement is to dig into the backlog and make sure the team has enough information to work on upcoming stories.

Sprint Planning:

Sprint planning is a stage in Agile methodologies in which teams decide which tasks to complete in an upcoming sprint and how that work will be achieved. A sprint planning meeting is a meeting that is dedicated to planning the next sprint. Further, Sprint planning is an event in the Scrum framework where the team determines the product backlog items, they will work on during that sprint and discusses their initial plan for completing those product backlog items. Business Analyst brings user stories that have been refined & it's been decided which ones will be worked on.

• Examine team availability.
• Establish velocity for your team. 
• Plan your sprint planning meeting. 
• Start with the big picture.
• Present new updates, feedback, and issue.
• Confirm team velocity and capacity.
• Go over backlog items.
• Determine task ownership.

Review: 

 A sprint review is an informal meeting held at the end of a sprint, during which the team shows what was accomplished, while the stakeholders provide feedback. It's a collaborative working session rather than a one-sided presentation.

A sprint review is more than just a demo session held to provide a routine status update. The main purpose of a sprint review is to inspect the outcome of the sprint, collect feedback from all the stakeholders, and adapt the backlog going forward.

When done right, a sprint review can help you create transparency, foster collaboration, and generate valuable insights. 

The sprint review meeting agenda typically includes the following topics:

• Sprint goal review. What did we set out to accomplish? What was accomplished? What is still unfinished?
• Demonstration. What was built? How does it work?
• Feedback. What feedback or questions does the rest of the team have?
• Release plan. What is the current release plan? What are the expected delivery dates?
• Discussion. Do we need to make changes to the plan?
• Next steps. What tasks should come next?

Retrospective:  

An Agile retrospective is a meeting that's held at the end of an iteration in Agile software development. During the retrospective, the team reflects on what happened in the iteration and identifies actions for improvement going forward.

A retrospective is a meeting held after a product ship to discuss what happened during the product development and release process, with the goal of improving things in the future based on those learnings and conversations.

Every retrospective meeting is slightly different but the common exercise that teams do is going one by one, each person responding to those 3 questions, followed by a group discussion of each point.

The 3 important questions of the meeting are:

• What did the team do well?
• What didn't go well?
• What can be improved?

Daily stand-up:

The daily stand-up – a.k.a. daily scrum – is a short, 15-minute (or less) daily meeting to discuss progress and identify blockers. Attendees are urged to participate while standing to help keep the meeting short.

Here’s a daily stand-up template to help your team start.

Attendees: Development team, scrum master, product owner

When: Once per day, typically in the morning.

Duration: No more than 15 minutes. Don't book a conference room and conduct the stand-up sitting down. Standing up helps keep the meeting short!

Agile framework: Scrum and kanban.

Purpose: A daily stand-up is designed to quickly inform everyone of what's going on across the team. It's not a detailed status meeting. The tone should be light and fun, but informative. Have each team member answers the following questions:

• What did I complete yesterday?
• What will I work on today?
• Am I blocked by anything?

There's implicit accountability in reporting what work you completed yesterday in front of your peers. No one wants to be the person who is constantly doing the same thing and not making progress.

Source:Four agile ceremonies, demystified | Atlassian & https://www.nuclino.com/

Picture source:Goals and Principles of the Sprint Retrospective Meeting | Agilest®  & Daily Stand-up - Quickscrum