Scrum Meeting

What Is a Scrum Meeting?

Scrum is an agile framework that teams use to produce products faster by breaking large development projects into smaller pieces that can be completed in short timeframes. Scrum meeting is a catch-all term that can describe different types of meetings held by Scrum teams. Scrum meetings include daily standups, sprint planning sessions, and sprint retrospectives.

Who Attends a Scrum Meeting?

Most Scrum meetings, including the ones we will discuss below, should include the entire Scrum team. For most companies, the team includes the following roles:

  • Scrum master (the team’s facilitator and point person)
  • Product owner (the project management lead for the agile team)
  • Development team

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What are the Different Types of Scrum Meetings?

A Scrum meeting can refer to any meeting held by a Scrum agile team during a product’s development. Here are the most common types.

Daily Scrum

The daily scrum, also called the standup, is a short daily meeting designed to let the team plan out its work for the day and identify any obstacles that could impact that work.

Most teams hold these meetings in the morning and limit them to 10 or 15 minutes. They are sometimes called standups because many teams hold them standing up to keep them short and focused.

Sprint Planning

It is a team meeting held before the next agile sprint. The team reviews its backlog during sprint planning and decides what items to prioritize for the next sprint.

The team will have two items by the end of a sprint planning meeting. The first is a sprint goal (a summary of the plan for the next sprint). The second item is the sprint backlog (the list of projects the team will work on during the sprint).

Sprint Retrospective

It is a post-sprint discussion. The Scrum team reviews what happened during the sprint to determine what worked, what didn’t work, and how they can improve the process during the next sprint.

A sprint retrospective is a narrower and more frequent version of the product retrospective: a meeting held after the launch of a product to assess what worked and what needs improvement.

Dive Deeper:

6 Tips for Better Product Retrospective Meetings

What Are the Benefits of Scrum Meetings?

Scrum teams work under short deadlines, and they are responsible for completing and submitting projects frequently. Regular meetings can help these teams stay in sync and spot obstacles early to avoid losing valuable time to delays.

Here are a few benefits of each Scrum meeting we discussed above.

Daily Scrum:

  • It helps the team identify obstacles so they can solve them quickly
  • Allows the team to make minor course corrections frequently, so they don’t spend too much time going down the wrong path

Sprint Planning:

  • Enable the team to align on sprint priorities before the sprint begins
  • It gives everyone on the team an understanding of their responsibilities in the next sprint

Sprint Retrospective:

  • Allows the team to reflect on their work after each sprint and celebrate their successes
  • It helps the team keep improving their processes

Related Terms:

agile / Scrum agile framework / Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) / Scrumban / planning poker (Scrum poker)