Challenges in Scrum Events

Scrum has 5 events which are the Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. Many scrum teams are facing challenges when they applying Scrum for first time, in this article, I’ll go through these challenges grouped by each event and demonstrate how to overcome them.

Sprint Planning Challenges

Challenge 1: Who should participate in Sprint Planning?

This meeting is to plan for the next 2 to 4 weeks sprint, so Product Owner (the one who own the product backlog) and Development Team (the team responsible for doing the required work) should be attend. Scrum Master is essential as he facilitates the meeting and ensures it takes place and all attendees understand its purpose.

In case the team has a shortage in some of the technical capabilities, SME can be invited by the development team to attend the meeting to help the team estimating the sprint potential features. As Scrum team is self-organized and cross-functional team, the Scrum master should report this issue and discuss with the team during sprint retrospective to find a way for improving the team capabilities.

In this meeting, only the product owner will represent the business and other business stakeholder are forbidden to attend this meeting.

Challenge 2: Product Backlog Readiness and Just-In-Time Refinement

During this meeting the product owner discusses the objective of the sprint and product backlog items that if completed will achieve the sprint goal. If these product backlog items are not ready before the meeting and product owner used Just-In-Time refinement, this will lead to poorly understand the product needs and may affect the sprint goal.

The product owner should have enough product backlog items ready before the first sprint, so the team can craft the sprint goal and come up with work plan for the initial days of the sprint.

Once the sprint starts the product backlog items are further refined, so that there will be some refined items ahead for future sprints.

Challenge 3: Entire Sprint Work decomposition

Is it required to decompose all sprint work required during the Sprint Planning meeting?

The answer is not necessarily. The development team can decompose the work required for the first few days of the sprint by the end of this meeting and collaboratively assign these tasks among themselves.

The sprint backlog emerges as the development team learns more about the work and modifies the sprint backlog accordingly until the sprint review meeting.

Challenge 4: Tools and techniques required during the Sprint Planning

The sprint planning should answer two questions:

1. What can be delivered in the upcoming sprint?
2. How will the work needed be achieved?

Scrum does not prescribe a specific set of estimation or planning techniques. The scrum team is expected to figure out the best methods, techniques, and practices to be used.

Daily Scrum Challenges

Challenge 1: Who should participate in Daily Scrum?

The attendance of Development Team is mandatory, but the attendance of the Scrum Master and Product Owners is not mandatory for Daily Scrum. If others are present, the scrum master ensures that they do not disrupt the meeting.

Challenge 2: Some teams or members may find it useless or time wasting

Some development teams can see the Daily Scrum as a way that waste time. In fact, the Daily scrum is very important as it can used to inspect the team progress toward the sprint goal, and improve communications and information sharing among the team.

The daily scrum is essential for the team as they will plan for the next 24 hours and discuss the impediments that may affect the team from achieving the sprint goal.

Challenge 3: 15-Minute time-boxing

The Scrum master ensures that the Development team has the meeting and teaches them to keep it within the 15-minute time-box.

If there are any issues or further discussion required, the team meets after the meeting to discuss in detail without wasting the whole team time.

Sprint Review Challenges

Challenge 1: Who should participate in Sprint Review?

This meeting is essential before the end of each sprint to inspect the Product Increment and adapt the backlog if needed.

The whole Scrum Team (Development team, Product Owner, and Scrum Master) should attend the meeting. Sometimes the product owner may invite some key stakeholders to attend the meeting.

Challenge 2: Who should lead and control the Sprint Review?

The sprint review is an informal meeting, so the participants should bring the highest level of collaboration. No one leads or control this meeting, but the Scrum Master ensures that the meeting takes place and not exceeded the time-boxing.

Challenge 3: Which features will be presented during the meeting?

As per the Scrum Guide, this is an informal meeting, not a status meeting, and the presentation of the Increment is intended to elicit feedback and foster collaboration.

The Development Team demonstrate the work that met the definition of “Done” and answers the questions about the increment. If there are any feature partially completed or doesn’t meet the definition of done, it shouldn’t be demonstrated during the meeting.

Challenge 4: If Sprint Review is to inspect the increment, why the Team discuss what to do in next sprint?

As we said this meeting is an opportunity to inspect the increment and adapt the product backlog, the team will compare the estimated work against the actual, review the timeline and budget, review the marketplace, or the product might have changes, then decide on what are the most valuable feature to do next.

Sprint Retrospective Challenges

Challenge 1: Who should participate in Sprint Retrospective?

Neither invited stakeholder nor SME are allowed to attend the retrospective, only Development team, Product Owner, and Scrum Master are allowed to attend the Sprint Retrospective meeting.

Challenge 2: Who leads the retrospective?

No one leads the retrospective, the meeting is an opportunity for the team to inspect themselves and find potential opportunities for improvement related to people, relationships, process, and tools.

The Scrum master ensures that the participants understand the purpose of the meeting and teach them to keep it in the time-box.

Challenge 3: Does the Retrospective review the product outcome?

No, the retrospective is to:

• Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools
• Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and,
• Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.

Challenge 4: Implementing all Retrospective finding in next Sprint

By the end of the Retrospective, the Scrum Team should have a prioritized list of the potential improvements to implement in the next sprint. The team should select at least one high priority improvement to be added to the sprint Backlog of the next iteration.

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