Meetings

Each of our team meetings has a purpose and a desired outcome. This page tries to describe these in a clear and concise way

Feature / Initiative Introduction

Purpose: Provide the team with a description of the desired product functionality, a vision of where this sits in the product and the expected benefits of this functionality to the end user

Outcome: The development team understand what is required and how that fits into the current product

Feature Refinement / Relative Sizing

Purpose: Allow the team to discuss one or more features from an Epic. The team can then decide, with the product owner, how these can be broken down into work items that make development possible and where each will add value to each product increment

Outcome: All the work for the feature(s) is broken down into work items. Where there is a lack of information that is required, investigations have been identified. The work items are relative sized to give a rough size to help with both planning and prioritisation

Backlog Refinement / Grooming

Purpose: Improve the level of understanding by the team of what the requirement is for each work item. Identify dependencies for work items to help with planning. Improve the estimates placed on work items by discussing them so everyone has a good understanding of what is required. Refinement is done at the functional level, the WHAT, not the HOW. If the team have a definition of ready, then each work item should meet that minimum standard

Outcome: The development team understand what is required for each work item. The work item is clearly described along with its acceptance criteria, which describe when that work item is considered complete. An estimate is provided for each work item by the team who now have a clear understanding of what the requirement is

Sprint Refinement / Grooming

Purpose: Ensure that the team has a good understanding of all work items that are likely to be in the next sprint. Refinement is done at the functional level, the WHAT, not the HOW. If the team have a definition of ready, then each work item should meet that minimum standard

Outcome: The development team understand what is required for each work item proposed for the next sprint. The work items are clearly described along with their acceptance criteria, which describe when that work item is considered complete. An estimate is provided for each work item by the team who now have a clear understanding of what the requirement is

Sprint Planning

Purpose For the PO to present the next highest priority work items to the team. The team needs to create it's sprint backlog for the upcoming iteration from these items in order to be able to produce a valuable product increment at the end of it

Outcome The Team has its sprint backlog for the upcoming sprint. the Team and PO have agreed on a sprint goal which defines the essence of what the team is trying to achieve for that iteration

Sprint Planning 2

Purpose For the development team to discuss HOW they are going to achieve the work items being considered for the upcoming sprint and determine if those selected are still feasible for the upcoming sprint

Outcome The team have probably broken work items into more detailed tasks. After discussing how they are going to approach execution of work items they can commit to the sprint backlog. Where they feel they can't complete the selected work items they work with the PO to modify the sprint backlog until they are happy they have one they are able to achieve

Sprint Retrospective

Purpose This is time for the Team to examine how they work. By looking back at the last sprint and using hindsight to see where they made mistakes and what worked really well they can try some changes to how they work to make them more effective going forwards

Outcome Each team member has had their opinions listened to. There is typically a list of things for the team to try in order to improve how they work

Sprint Review / Demo

Purpose Obtain feedback on the work carried out from stakeholders. Use this to guide future development to ensure we are delivering what the end user actually needs and wants

Outcome Stakeholders have given feedback on the work carried out in the past iteration and the product backlog will be modified or work items re-prioritised based on this feedback