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Scrum in practice: Roles, sprint and the four meetings

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tagsglossar, projekt, agil

2 min read

Scrum in practice: Roles, sprint and the four meetings

In short: Scrum works in sprints of one to four weeks with three roles, three artifacts and four meetings so that a team regularly produces deliverable results and learns.

In more detail: Scrum is the best-known agile framework. It prescribes no techniques but a rhythm with transparency, inspection and adaptation (empiricism).

In Depth

Three roles

  • Product owner (PO): responsible for the value, maintains and prioritises the product backlog, decides what is built.
  • Scrum master: ensures the team understands and applies Scrum, removes impediments, facilitates; not project management.
  • Development team (developers): self-organising, brings all skills, decides how to build; typically 3 to 9 people.

Three artifacts

  • Product backlog: ordered list of all wishes (user stories).
  • Sprint backlog: the items chosen for the sprint plus plan.
  • Increment: the working result that meets the definition of done.

The sprint and the meetings

A sprint (1 to 4 weeks, fixed length) contains:

  1. Sprint planning: what do we build (sprint goal), how?
  2. Daily scrum (15 minutes daily): progress, plan for the day, impediments.
  3. Sprint review: show the result to the stakeholder, get feedback, adjust the backlog.
  4. Sprint retrospective: how do we work? What do we improve in the next sprint? In between refinement (backlog care, estimating).

Tips and pitfalls

  • Sprint goal understandable and not changed mid-sprint.
  • Velocity (points completed) helps planning but is not performance measurement.
  • Set the definition of done together.
  • Frequent pitfalls: Scrum-but (omitting rules), daily as a reporting round for the boss, PO not reachable, sprint overload, no honest retro.
  • Alternatives/complements: Kanban (flow instead of sprints), XP, SAFe/LeSS for large organisations. In the IHK documentation you explain how you adapted Scrum (for example a one-person project: sprint planning and review with the trainer).

See also: Agile methods (Scrum and Kanban), User stories and acceptance criteria, Process models compared

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