STEP 4

Timeline

At this point, the teams have successfully built the Scrum framework using the icons on the BYOS sheet. In theory, they all know when Sprint Review comes in relation to Sprint Planning. In practice though, I’ve found it useful to review this with them again quickly. I use the large headings from the BYOS kit for this, along with a timeline I draw on the whiteboard. I then ask them, as a class, to place the 4 meetings on the whiteboard along the timeline. As a class, they can usually do this in under a minute. What’s great is that you’ll get another chance to clarify any misunderstandings here as someone will undoubtedly still have questions as to the order of things.

If the following things were not covered during the “Show and Tell” section, I make sure to clarify them now:

Public End (Review) and Private End (Retrospective) of the Sprint

The Scrum Framework has two ends to a Sprint. The first is the Sprint Review. As you’ve learned, this is the time that the team demos the functionality they built during the sprint to the Product Owner, and the Stakeholders. This is the public end of the sprint, as it’s an open meeting that allows outside stakeholders to see progress. The team is responsible for doing the demo, and does so with minimal setup—there’s no need to make PowerPoint slides, all teams need to do is demo the working software they completed.

The Private end of the sprint comes in the form of the Retrospective. The Retrospective is one of the inspect and adapt loops we have in the framework. In its most basic form, a team discusses what went well over the last sprint, and what they’d like to improve moving forward. This conversation is usually facilitated by the Scrum Master, though anyone on the team is welcome to facilitate the meeting. We call it the ‘Private end of the sprint’ because it’s only for the team. We want to create a safe space in which the team feels free to discuss whatever they wish. The sorts of deep conversations teams can have in this meeting don’t happen unless there is a lot of trust between team members so that people feel safe to speak up. In most organizations, this can only happen when there are no bosses present and no non-team members around. The outcome of this meeting should be 1 to 3 actionable items the team would like to address during the next sprint with the aim of improving their process. Having more than 3 actionable items may seem like a good idea at first, but we want to be sure to address the items, and having more often means the team doesn’t get to any. We also want to make small changes to the system, and observe the results, instead of making 20 changes this sprint and hoping for the best.”