SCRUM CEREMONIES & TIMEBOXES
This ceremony should consume no more than 10% of the sprint length
What is Backlog Refinement? (recommended to consume no more than 10% of Dev Team capacity)
When the Product Owner assigns specific work to individual developers
What is command-and-control?
The percentage of sprint work that should typically be unplanned/support work
What is 10-20%? (though this can vary by team context)
What you do when a manager wants to attend the team's retrospective
What is "politely decline and explain it's a safe space for the team"?
"We don't need a retrospective because..."
"...nothing ever changes" or "...everything is going perfectly"
The recommended timebox for a Daily Scrum, regardless of sprint length
What is 15 minutes?
This happens when teams consistently carry over 40%+ of their stories sprint-to-sprint
What is chronic carryover? maybe inconsistent results or unstable velocity
This chart shows cumulative work completed versus time in a release
What is a burnup chart?
The response when asked "How do we make the developers go faster?"
What is "focus on removing impediments and improving flow, not individual speed"?
"Can't we just skip testing to make the deadline?"
What is technical debt? (or quality disaster incoming)
This ceremony includes inspection of the increment and adaptation of the Product Backlog
What is the Sprint Review?
The term for when stakeholders bypass the Product Owner to add work directly
What is backdoor deals? or going around the Product Owner
The metric calculated by dividing completed story points by committed story points
What is say-do ratio? or commitment reliability
How to handle a Product Owner who writes technical tasks instead of user stories
What is "coach them on writing user-value focused stories with acceptance criteria"?
"The developers can just figure out the requirements as they code"
What is scope creep? (or requirements chaos)
The maximum recommended length for Sprint Planning in a 2-week sprint
What is 4 hours?
When velocity becomes a performance metric rather than a planning tool
What is weaponized velocity?
The lead time measurement that excludes wait states and focuses only on active work
What is cycle time?
The intervention when a team's standups regularly exceed 30 minutes
What is "observe the standup and help them refocus on the three questions/keep it to coordination"?
"Let's just add more people to the late project"
What is Brooks' Law? ("Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later")
The only required attendees for the Sprint Retrospective
Who are the Scrum Team members? (Development Team, Scrum Master, and Product Owner)
The dysfunction when retrospective action items never get implemented
What is retrospective theater?
The four metrics from "Accelerate" that predict software delivery performance
What are Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery), and Change Failure Rate?
The approach when team members refuse to estimate because "story points are made up"
What is "explain that estimation helps with planning and forecasting, not performance measurement"?
"We're doing Scrum, but we've modified it to work for us by removing..."
"...all the ceremonies/roles/artifacts that make it actually work" (leads to "ScrumBut")