Daily stand ups

Daily stand-ups are great—if done well. I might have one of these with my direct team.

A good stand up is:

• Laser focussed.
• Very short (when we are done, we're done).
• All about solving problems and agreeing to actions.

Sprint reviews

For me, sprint reviews are the most valuable of all agile ceremonies. It's a chance for the team to show off their achievements and successes, get feedback from the product team (on behalf of our customers) and air any issues or challenges.

A good sprint review centres on value and transparency.

• Did we keep our promises?
• I am rarely interested in work done (e.g. I built this SQL script or wrote this code).
• Focus on value delivered; what customer problem did we solve?
• Show real working software.
  • Assume you are talking to a non-technical customer; don't make it unnecessarily complex.
  • Please, never demo lines of code.
• Be transparent around where the time went:
  • Innovation - we built new things.
  • Optimisation - we improved some things.
  • Maintenance - we fixed something or stopped it from breaking.
• Show metrics around capacity:
  • % time lost due to sickness, holidays and interruptions (we had n% capacity this sprint)
  • Unplanned interruptions
  • Planned interruptions (we can always predict some level of unplanned work)
  • Velocity trends
• How can we automate manual interruptions?
• What are our promises for the next sprint?

All hands

Weekly and monthly all hands are great sessions to:

• Celebrate success and call out great work.