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Scrum Cheat Sheet

Meetings and Ceremonies

  • Two week sprint (iteration)
  • Sprint Planning (<4hrs) – Start by trying 2hrs. Remember to take couple of breaks, especially if remote working; Don’t forget to set your Sprint Goal.
  • Sprint Review ($lt;1hr) – Invite your stakeholders, this will really help you with your focus during the sprint.
  • Sprint Retrospective (<1hr) – Keep these focused on small improvements for the next iteration. Take one (or two) improvement(s) and add it to your backlog and play it as a story in your next sprint
  • Daily Stand up (<15min) – Keep the focus and try to avoid "solutionising" or too much detail during this time
  • Backlog refinement (approx. 10% of the time). Work out what works best for you here. Refinement is not just the PO’s job. You might want to do an hour each week, or say 15 mins per day. Experiment with this to find what works for you as a team.

Sounds like a lot of meetings, right? It’s actually averages out to just 30 minutes per day over two weeks.

Other considerations

The below are important to do if you're moving to scrum from some other method. It's also good to periodically review them to continually try and improve how the team works

  • Review your Definition of Ready – use a ticket template if that helps
  • Review your Definition of Done – and use it
  • How are you going to write your tickets? – User Story format, hypothesis or “Give, when, then”
  • How are you going to size your tickets? Points, T-Shirt size. Don’t get hung up on this. Don’t worry about your velocity in the first few sprints - get a few sprints done and then use the data to guide your future planning. Sizing helps drive that conversation, with a by-product of velocity.
  • How will you visualise your work (the Kanban board), the metrics, daily goal and anything else that the team finds useful?
  • How will you measure your progress during the sprint? Burn up, burn down chart
  • Don’t forget to factor into your planning all the other stuff that we have to do 121’s, PDP time, meetings, holidays etc. etc. and plan accordingly.
  • Before sprint planning, do some ticket refinement as a team. There's nothing worse than going into a planning meeting with nothing to plan! As a reminder, try to use the planning meeting for that rather than refinement. i.e. here’s a list of 10 things we need to do in priority order, what can we do in the next two weeks. With negotiation, it might not be the exact order.
  • Push back (as a team) if someone tries to bring in unplanned work (possible exception being high priority/security issues). Getting to the end of the sprint and running out of work? What about refining a few tickets; setting up that environment you’ve never had time to do; PDP etc..

Further info

Got a spare hour? Why not watch 5 Common Gaps in Scrum Adoptions it might help you avoid some of the pitfalls.