Reimagining Scrum Ceremonies

2024-03-25 · 3 min · medium

Effective Scrum ceremonies, part 3.

So far, this series has covered the trade-offs between writing documents and holding meetings, then writing itself, the heart of async. The golden circle helps keep written communication focused enough to drive discussion, and writing brings inclusivity, thoughtfulness and flexibility with it.

Ceremonies

Scrum teams repeat a set of ceremonies every one or two weeks. A typical two-week sprint for a medium-sized team:

• Standups (15 min) × 10
• Sprint planning (3 hr) × 1
• Sprint review (2 hr) × 1
• Sprint retrospective (1.5 hr) × 1

That's 9 hours per person every sprint, just over a day. Against a 38-hour week (76 hours a sprint), it's about 12% of the sprint in recurring meetings, and they often run over. That's worth making more efficient.

Standups

Standups are one of the most widely adopted practices from Extreme Programming. They usually cover:

1. What I did yesterday
2. What I'm doing today
3. Blockers, if any

Distributed teams make standups harder. Once everyone is sitting down, it's easy to run over or get stuck on one detailed issue, and the meeting loses its purpose. Engagement drops, and the team ends up holding the meeting because it's in the calendar.

Two changes cover the list above:

• Write updates. The board should answer points 1 and 2. If it can't, that's either a tooling problem or a people one. Comment on stories and move tickets between lanes and statuses. What happens when someone is out of the office, or can't make the standup? Relying on sync communication creates frustration and slows everyone down.
• Flag blocked stories. If you're blocked, you're probably already working on it, not waiting for tomorrow's standup. Flag the ticket, comment on why and act on it. Waiting to say it out loud slows everything down.

Do both, and it may become clear the daily standup isn't needed. Its real value is the chance to connect. If the team still wants one, drop the status update and talk about next actions, sprint goals, team health, and high-risk branches or changes.

Tickets that show each story's progress also spare people from answering the same questions from several colleagues, which is good for psychological safety.

Retrospectives

Agile is about continuous improvement, and the retrospective is where it happens: surfacing issues, celebrating success and agreeing on actions. Run poorly, retros do more harm than good:

1. If they rarely produce anything meaningful, people lose faith in them.
2. Recency bias means people raise what happened recently, so older issues repeat.
3. They run out of time, through poor grouping, no voting or no theme.

Async fixes most of this:

• Capture inputs. Encourage everyone to note topics for the next retro throughout the sprint, in a Google Form, a doc or their favourite note-taking app. If anonymity isn't a concern, they can send them straight to the facilitator. This helps with point 2.
• Group inputs. Before the retro, the host groups related topics, for example by clustering sticky notes on a Miro board. This helps with point 3.
• Vote. Voting focuses the discussion on the topics people feel most strongly about. It's quick, so it can happen before or during the meeting. This also helps with point 3.

Sprint planning

Planning is the heaviest ceremony, made of several smaller processes, and each of those could be an article. Here it's only about async and efficiency:

1. Refine the backlog async. Set time aside to add metrics or detail to stories so they're ready for the sprint.
2. Prioritise the backlog tightly, so the sprint stays focused on outcomes.
3. Draft the sprint goals before the meeting. The product owner or engineering manager can do this, and it gives the meeting a natural starting point. Share them with everyone beforehand.
4. Ask the team to read the draft stories for the sprint beforehand and write comments on anything unclear.
5. Hold the meeting.

The payoff:

• The team has time to think properly about stories, which surfaces problems earlier.
• The meeting starts with a list of questions ready to discuss. This alone makes a big difference.
• There's less risk of pursuing the wrong thing.
• Having seen the goal and the rough set of stories, the team can better judge whether the goal is achievable or needs cutting back.

None of these changes is big. Together, they make each sync meeting count for more and let people contribute when it suits them.