What is a Scrum meeting?

A Scrum meeting is an important part of any Agile project. The Agile Manifesto says that face-to-face meetings are the most efficient way of communicating information with Agile teams. Scrum meetings offer team leaders and their employees the opportunity to get together and exchange information in a way that’s as productive as possible.

Scrum meetings give stakeholders, managers and team members a chance to communicate, ensuring they’re aligned at each step of the project. There’s more than one type of Scrum meeting and in Agile methodology, team members cycle through the meeting types depending on which stage of a sprint they’re at, either planning the next block of work or assessing the work that’s just been done to ensure they’re making progress towards the team’s goals.

How Scrum and Agile work together

Agile Scrum meetings are the most common type, because of Scrum’s core place in the world of Agile methodology. However, Scrum can be used in other situations too, including in projects that use the more traditional Waterfall methodology.

Scrum meetings fit Agile particularly well because of the frequency and types of meetings. Daily, short meetings provide an opportunity for progress updates and requests, while planning and review meetings help guide the next sprint.

The different types of Scrum meeting

When Scrum meetings are being used as part of an Agile project, the team will hold several types of meetings depending on the stage of the project. These meetings can include:

Sprint planning

The sprint planning phase takes place before each sprint. It’s used to make sure that stakeholders and all those working on the project understand the objectives of the coming sprint and are in agreement about what must be done.

The purpose of a sprint planning meeting is to plan upcoming work. The team can look at the list of tasks and outstanding goals and consider how much can be achieved in the planned sprint.

The Scrum Master, development team and product owner will agree on the goals and then assign and communicate tasks to the relevant people. Time boxing may be employed to ensure teams don’t spend too much time on any one task.

In general, sprint planning meetings are broken into two phases:

• Discussing the scope of the sprint
• Planning deliverables

A sprint planning meeting will usually require two hours of discussion per week that the sprint lasts. Sprints are usually between one and four weeks long, so a sprint planning meeting should take no more than one working day at most.

Once everyone is in agreement about the goals of the next sprint, the work can begin.

Daily standups

Daily standups are less formal than traditional meetings. As the name suggests, they take place daily and are held with the participants standing up. Each meeting should typically take no longer than 15 minutes to complete.

The meetings follow the same format every day, with the Scrum Master asking some set questions, such as:

• What tasks were completed yesterday?
• What is the goal for today?
• What obstacles is the team facing?

The meeting is attended only by the Scrum Master and the development team. There’s no need for stakeholders to be present for each of these meetings. The purpose of the meeting is to ensure everyone is up to date on the progress of the project and to give team members the chance to air any concerns they have or ask for help if there’s something holding up their progress.

If a sprint is being used as an opportunity for someone to take on more responsibility or take the reins on a specific task, daily standups can offer an effective way of checking in on that person’s progress and ensuring they’re not out of their depth. Giving team members some autonomy can be a useful talent development strategy, and providing a framework for those workers to ask for assistance when needed can help them increase their confidence faster.

If you have a large number of remote employees, the daily standup could be swapped out for a short video call scheduled for a set time each morning. This can offer similar benefits and it can also help reduce the isolation sometimes felt by remote workers.

Sprint reviews

Once the sprint has been completed, the team can review their progress. In some teams, this meeting is called the ‘sprint demo’. The meeting is attended by the Scrum team and any stakeholders so they can review the work that’s been done.

The review meeting gives the team a chance to show the progress they’ve made on the user stories worked on during the most recent sprint. The work being shown should be polished enough to use for a demonstration. Sprint reviews are used to get feedback on the work, but their primary goal is to show the value the project has to offer.

If the stakeholders have feedback, the team can consider that feedback and, if it’s accepted, they can add any requests to the project backlog so they can be addressed in a future sprint.

A sprint review is a more formal meeting than a daily standup and can be expected to take longer. On average, teams can expect to allocate one hour of review meeting time per week of sprint work.

Sprint retrospectives

The sprint retrospective is also held at the end of the sprint. Unlike the review, which focuses on demonstrating the work done and getting feedback on it, the retrospective meeting gives the team a chance to think about how the sprint went.

The Scrum Master will lead the meeting and outside stakeholders may also be involved. The meeting will consider:

• What went well
• What went wrong
• How things could be done differently to improve collaboration

It’s a good idea to allocate about 45 minutes of time per week of sprint for the retrospective. This should allow enough time for everyone to voice any concerns they have and consider potential solutions.

The Scrum Master is there to encourage people to give constructive feedback and guide conversation. Sometimes, the Scrum Master may also be the direct team leader, but they could also be from a different team and serve as a mediator. As a mediator, they can help team members feel confident enough to give feedback and ask for changes that could make the team more successful.

What makes a good meeting?

The idea behind Scrum meetings is that they provide the benefits of regular meetings without the perceived bureaucracy that often causes knowledge workers to say they dislike meetings. Scrum meetings achieve this by being short and to the point. If you want to embrace some of the good ideas about Scrum meetings in your workplace, consider the following:

• Hold regular, short meetings because they’re usually more productive than longer ones
• Have a clear agenda for each meeting
• Set a time limit for each agenda point and stick to it
• Have the meeting led by someone who’s good at keeping things on track
• Use visual aids and charts where appropriate

Even if you aren’t using Agile methodology, you could still benefit from knowing what a Scrum meeting is and the essential ideas that make it so popular. For example, rather than basing your schedule around Scrums, consider basing it on milestones. Each time a major part of a project is completed, review the work and get feedback from your team members and the stakeholders to ensure the project is progressing as well as it can.

By running meetings that are short and productive, you can help increase employee morale and improve the employee experience . When you keep everyone informed through successful meetings, you can also help them be productive in their roles.