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Rituals

What rituals are there for an agile scrum team?

Each sprint (ours are 3 weeks) has

Scrum aka standup
The goal is 15 minute daily meeting

The common three questions are:
What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
What is in your way?

The goal is transparency, everyone on the team should have the opportunity to know what each person is working on, and for the team to all get an idea of where they are on the commitments for the sprint, what issues there are, and use the opportunity to help out other team mates as needed.

Grooming
The goal is to prepare work for upcoming sprints, break epics (large goals that will span sprints) into stories (a deliverable piece of work, as small as you can make it and still assign value). Each story should be assigned a complexity rating, or story point. These are Fibonacci numbers (1, 3, 5, 8). These are complexity not hours!

Retrospective
At the end of the sprint look back
What action items did we have last sprint, did we make progress?
How many points did we complete?
How many did we rollover into this upcoming sprint?
How does this compare to our average?
Did we point these stories correctly?
What stories rolled? Why? How can we prevent this in the future?
What went well and we should keep doing?
What did not go well and we need to improve - and action items to make that happen.

Demos
Show off what you finished to stakeholders, customers, product owners... Anyone you think might like to see it and provide feedback. You can to get feedback as fast as possible to make sure you are going the right direction.

Sprint planning
Figure out how many story points you have done in the past, what your teams availability is, and commit to finish a specific set of stories (preferably in priority order where possible) totalling that number of story points. You need to break these stories into tasks, with estimate hours (if you do that, once a team matures enough you can skip that if there is a regular cadence of tasks completing - but the team needs to get good at sizing the tasks small enough for this first).
Always assume 20% meetings and misc.

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