Lesson 04: Introduction to Events

Let’s have an overview of the ‘events’ in Scrum and their significance.

00:04.500 – Welcome back, in this lesson we are going to talk about scrum events.
00:11.500 – As you remember we have these iterations where we do our things and create something, receive feedback and repeat again.
00:21.500 – These sprints are events; each sprint is an event.
00:27.500 – And even inside each sprint we have four other events so in total we have five of them, but among those five, sprint itself is a little bit different because it’s a container for the rest of them the rest of them are in a different level of abstraction if you would like.
00:50.500 – But anyway, so let’s take a quick look.
00:53.500 – we start everything with sprint planning. Sprint planning is one of the events and that’s where we take a look at the product backlog check the most important items, and pick a number of them for our sprint backlog, the short-term plan that we have for the sprint that’s a main purpose and obviously as you remember the sprint goal is also part of the sprint backlog so when I say we create the sprint backlog it also includes the sprint goal each sprint has its own goal they are not all the same obviously.
01:29.500 – Then we start working and during the sprint we create multiple increments of the product what it means, is that whenever we are done with one of those items we add it to the latest increment of the product and a new increment will be created as long as it’s compatible with the definition of done.
01:55.500 – So we create multiple increments and one we are working inside the sprint we also have those really short daily scrums.
02:07.500 – A daily scrum is a simple meeting where the developers get to getter and talk about the work they are doing and what they are going to do in the next period, the next 24 hours.
02:18.500 – That’s a daily scrum, very simple. it’s for synchronization.
02:24.500 – We continue like that and when we approach the end of the sprint we have two other events, one of them is a sprint review meeting and that’s where we check our progress and the latest increment or in other words the sum of all increments that we have created here, in most cases the sum of all increments and the latest increment are the same but that’s a different story.
02:52.500 – Anyway, we will show it to the customer and sometimes end-user’s representatives because it’s not necessarily released, we show it to those people and receive feedback and think about the things we are going to do next.
03:08.500 – We will have ideas, we will have ideas for adding new items for the product backlog, for example, you’ve added one feature for your CRM to your application and you see that it’s really great although if we had this other feature then we would be able to retire an application that we were using for 20 million years ago and it would be a lot easier for us, if that’s a good idea you will add that item to your product backlog, the product owner reorders it again and we’ll see where it lands if it’s on the top of the product backlog it will be developed in the next sprint.
03:48.500 – So that’s a sprint review it’s about the product mainly.
03:53.500 – After that we have a sprint retrospective that’s only for the team, the scrum master, the product owner and the developers it’s not about other people.
04:02.500 – they get together and think about the process, the way they’ve been working together and the main question is how can we become better the next sprint?
04:15.500 – They plan one or a few improvements and that’s what they are going to do in the next sprint.
04:22.500 – so that’s everything about events but really really short in the next lesson we’re going to go through each of those things.
04:33.500 – But for now, the other thing that I can mention is that all these events are created to improve, or enhance or maximize or optimize transparency, inspection and adaptation now if you ask me the main goal here is adaptation, that’s the ultimate goal that’s the core of agile.
04:58.500 – but when you think about it, when you want to adapt you need to inspect you need to check to see what you’ve done you have to check your environment see how the product works in the environment So inspection is required for adaptation on the other hand, how can you inspect?
05:17.500 – in order to have proper inspection you also need to have transparency meaning that, the product has to be clear for example, when you say that something is done what do you mean by done? for example do you also include user documentation when you say something is done, does it mean that it also has user documentation or something else?
05:41.500 – So it has to be transparent you need to have a definition of done, that helps with transparency but that’s not the only thing, even your process for working the way you work, the expectations that you have from others stakeholders, from other people in your organization all of that need to be transparent in order to enable inspection which in turn enables adaptation.
06:06.500 – The other thing that I also mentioned in one of the previous lessons is that all the events are timeboxed.
06:13.500 – being timeboxed means that they have a duration that you set beforehand and you never never expand it.
06:25.500 – The sprint itself is one month or shorter.
06:29.500 – So it means that for example, you decided you want to have two weeks sprints in your project so all sprints will be two weeks, unless you decide to change it in the future but you never change it in the middle of the sprint.
06:45.500 – The sprint planning meeting is maximum 8 hours, you may decide to have it shorter, daily scrum is 15 minutes, sprint review is 4 hours, sprint retrospective is 3 hours but don’t worry about those I’ll get back to them What it means is that if your sprint review, if you decide that you sprint reviews would be timeboxed for 2 hours for example, the maximum was four, you will never expand it, you will never have 2 hours and a half you will never have 3 hours.
07:23.500 – So you have to be focused while you are working, you have to focus on the most important things if you have random ideas pop in up you have to park them somewhere and take care of them later.
07:37.500 – That’s about timeboxing which is very important in all agile systems, and then the other thing is that we prefer to have all these events at the same time and place not with each other, each one of them.
07:52.500 – So for example, daily scrum, is the most important one, we really want to make it simple no, instead of deciding about the next meeting everyday about the time and place, that’s a lot of work for 15 minutes meeting we prefer to know that for example, every day we’re going to have our daily scrum at noon in front of our sprint backlog the board that we have for our sprint backlog, or our sprint reviews will be on the last day of every month in case you have monthly sprints and it will be in this or that room for all the stakeholders to know, something like that.
08:36.500 – It makes everything more regular, easier to manage you have a tempo you go on with the tempo you don’t distract yourself with these type of decisions and instead you will be focus on creating valuable product.
08:55.500 – Alright so, that was the high level overview of all events and in the next lesson we’re going to talk about the sprint which is the container for all events and also an event by itself.

In the next lesson, we’ll talk about the first event: Sprint.

Lesson 04: Introduction to Events

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