Scrum prescribes a sequence of events that are specially designed to aid teams in becoming more agile and boosting their performance. Let's take a brief look at the list of essential Scrum events for the purpose of software development.
The first Scrum event that we will be examining is the planning session. During planning, the team examines the items from the backlog and commits to a set of tasks that the team will be working on during the next sprint.
As you probably expect, the team needs to periodically sync up so that all the team members are on the same page with respect to the tasks that other team members are currently working on. This is facilitated by the daily stand-up, a time-boxed session that usually takes no longer than 30 minutes. Each team member speaks in turn and briefly answers the following questions:
- What was I working on yesterday?
- What will I be working on today?
- Are there any blockers for completing a particular task?
Blockers, if left unresolved, could jeopardize the team's goal for the sprint. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to detect blockers as early as possible and engage the team members to figure out ways to work around or address them.
At the end of a sprint, the team usually holds a retrospective session where team members openly discuss the things that went right, as well as the things that went wrong, during the sprint. For each problem that's encountered, the team attempts to identify its root cause and propose a series of actions to remedy it. The selected actions are applied during the next sprint cycle and their effect is re-evaluated in the next retrospective.