Agile Ceremonies

Avi Siegel

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5 min read

What is an Agile ceremony?

Agile ceremonies are structured meetings that enable Agile teams to stay organized, aligned, and continuously improving. They provide dedicated time for planning, coordination, review, and reflection.

These ceremonies serve as the fundamental framework that keeps Agile teams operating efficiently and productively.

What are the goals of Agile ceremonies?

The specific goals of Agile ceremonies differ for each ceremony, but overall the primary purpose is to:

  • Maintain alignment across the team

  • Enable proper planning and execution of work

  • Ensure regular communication and collaboration

  • Identify and address impediments quickly

  • Drive continuous improvement

  • Keep work focused on delivering value to customers

What are the 5 core Agile ceremonies?

Backlog Grooming

Backlog Grooming is a recurring ceremony where the product manager (PM), engineering manager (EM), and development team review and refine items in the product backlog. The team discusses upcoming work in detail, ensuring tasks are well understood, properly sized, and correctly prioritized.

During this ceremony, the team:

  • Reviews and refines tasks

  • Breaks down large sets of work

  • Estimates level of effort

  • Prioritizes and sequences work

Sprint Planning

Sprint Planning is a recurring ceremony where the engineering manager, product manager, and development team prepare for and ultimately start the next sprint. The process gives the team the space to go through any necessary task review before making final decisions on what work should be completed within the sprint, based on priorities and team capacity.

During this ceremony, the team:

  • Reviews capacity

  • Revisits priorities

  • Refines tasks as necessary (most of this, if not all, should have been done already in Backlog Grooming)

  • Selects tasks for inclusion in the sprint

  • Identifies dependencies and risks for transparency and expectation management

  • Officially starts the sprint

Pro Tip: Before performing Sprint Planning with the entire team, the PM and EM should meet together in a Sprint Prep meeting to get aligned ahead of time. Sprint Prep is not an official Agile ceremony, but is a key way for team leadership to get on the same page before discussing plans with the team, so as to be more efficient regarding people’s time within Sprint Planning itself. Note that the intent is not to hide these conversations, but rather to properly utilize people’s time. Transparency is still key.

Standup

Standup is a brief, timeboxed, typically daily meeting where the development team shares progress updates and surfaces blockers. This quick synchronization helps maintain alignment and enables rapid problem-solving.

During this ceremony, each team member provides details on:

  • What they accomplished since the last standup

  • What they plan to work on next

  • Any blockers or challenges they’re facing

Pro Tip: Keep standups focused on accomplishments, not merely activities. You don’t want the meeting to just be a boring status update where teammates barely listen to each other. Rather, you want the team focused on collectively delivering value to users. That is done by accomplishing goals, not by performing tasks.

Sprint Review

Sprint Review occurs at the end of each sprint, and consists of two main components:

  1. Close the sprint in preparation for the next sprint

  2. Discuss and showcase work that was completed in the sprint

Closing out the sprint consists of:

  • Ensuring all tasks are assigned the correct status, with the most important update being to mark completed work as done so it is not brought into the next sprint

  • Discussing any incomplete work - how much work is left to be done in the next sprint, as well as any new tasks that must be created to properly log additional required work now that the core task is more intimately understood

Showcasing completed work consists of:

  • Technical discussions regarding newly implemented architecture

  • Live demonstrations of new features and product improvements

Pro Tip: Pull demos out of the agenda. The days where sprints are being closed and started can already be meeting-heavy and overwhelming - let the team focus on transitioning from one sprint to the next by scheduling demos on a different day.

Retrospective

Retrospective (or simply “Retro”) is a recurring ceremony focused on continuous improvement.

During this ceremony, the team reflects on:

  • What went well during the sprint

  • What could be improved

  • Specific action items to take to improve processes

  • Follow-up on action items from the previous Retrospective

Pro Tip: Don’t do Retrospectives on the same day as Sprint Review and Sprint Planning. The days where sprints are being closed and started can already be meeting-heavy and overwhelming - let the team focus on transitioning from one sprint to the next by scheduling Retros on a different day.

Who should be involved in Agile ceremonies?

Each role on the team will be responsible for and involved in a different set of overlapping activities during each sprint.

  • The product manager facilitates or participates in all ceremonies (with the possible exception of Retrospectives)

  • The engineering manager facilitates or participates in all ceremonies

  • The developers participate in all relevant ceremonies (excluding Sprint Prep in particular)

Best practices for Agile ceremonies

  • Add Sprint Prep to your list of ceremonies. It will serve as an important touchpoint between the product manager and engineering manager to keep said team leadership aligned on priorities and expectations.

  • Document decisions and important discussions as you go. Often, teams will have deep, technical discussions regarding how to accomplish certain work, and then part ways and leave it to the assignee to take care of the rest. A common result ends up being that details are forgotten, with no paper trail to remind anyone of what was agreed upon, which in turn means the conversations have to later be had again. Take notes within the task comments and descriptions in your task management system - your future self will thank you.

  • Don’t skip Retros. Many teams tend to skip the Retrospective meeting because they don’t see value in it, which often occurs because they focus too much on back-patting and complaining, and not enough time on collaborating on and assigning action items to improve the situation. Iterative improvement is important to keeping your sprints moving efficiently and productively. So again - do not skip Retros.

  • Keep ceremonies timeboxed. It’s easy for meetings to run long - enforced timeboxes will help the team stay focused.

  • Simplify the sprint closing/starting meeting(s). Some teams choose to, on a single day, close a sprint, showcase progress from said sprint, collaborate on how to improve processes, perform last minute task refinement, and start the next sprint. This, of course, can lead to long days of endless meetings - an exhausting endeavor for the entire team. As such, some teams choose to pull demos and Retrospectives out of the agenda, and schedule them on a different day. By doing this, the team can fully focus on the main goal of the day - transitioning to the next sprint - while also giving more space for demos and Retros to occur in less rushed environments.

  • Do not allow multitasking during Agile ceremonies. These aren’t times to accomplish other work. That will result in having to reiterate information repeatedly throughout the meetings, as well as missed insights when the knowledgeable party wasn’t paying enough attention to speak up.