Agile ceremonies are structured meetings that help product teams plan, track, and review their work. These ceremonies are designed to promote collaboration, transparency, and accountability, and to help teams stay focused on their goals.
Agile ceremonies are best thought of as patterns that are commonly found in high performance teams, rather than a rigid process that must be followed exactly. If you understand why each of the ceremonies exists, then you can reflect whether you also need this meeting, and if so, what format it should take.
Ultimately, the benefit of agile ceremonies is that they help you work with an agile mindset. Which is to say, they help you stay flexible and customer focused, with the end result of creating more value for your users faster.
This article will explore the most common agile ceremonies, the purpose for each of them, what they typically look like, and how they combine to allow teams to collaborate, execute and deliver frequent value to customers.
“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
- Henry Ford
What is agile?
Agile is an iterative process for building products that helps teams to deliver continuous value to their customers by increasing team velocity. The Agile Manifesto outlines four core principles:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
- The Agile Manifesto
Agile was born out of frustration towards the waterfall model that was often rigid, inflexible and slow. Being agile doesn’t mean that you can’t document or follow processes, it means that it’s more important to see what works for you. It makes sure your way of working maximizes value creation for customers, rather than becoming an end in its own right.
Working in an agile way has five benefits:
- Flexibility - as work is broken down into small chunks of work, you can easily adapt to changing customer needs or unexpected challenges by adjusting your priorities.
- Transparency - having regular catch ups helps build trust among the team members and stakeholders, and allows them to identify and resolve issues early on.
- Collaboration - frequent collaboration between people with cross-functional skill sets results in high quality and productivity, and ultimately better outcomes.
- Continuous improvement - regular reflection on how the team works and adjustments to this means there is continuous improvement of the team’s performance over time.
- Customer focus - putting the customer at the heart of the development process makes sure their needs are prioritized, and the team's way of working maximizes value created for customers.
What is scrum?
Scrum is a methodology designed to help teams function with agile principles at heart. It is inspired by rugby where the team comes together in a “scrum” to move the ball forward. Unlike waterfall, scrum helps cross-functional teams to plan and ship features in (usually) one or two week sprints. Scrum significantly reduces the risk of building the wrong thing and helps to prioritize pieces of work that will bring the most value to the customers.
Scrum is one of the two most common working patterns for agile teams:
- Scrum - teams work in 1-2 week sprints, allowing prioritization, planning and reflection to be batched into a regular meeting routine. This balances forward planning and flexibility, and is suitable for most teams.
- Kanban - teams work continuously, with prioritization, planning and reflection done on the fly. This allows the team to be incredibly flexible, at the cost of forward planning. It’s best suited to teams where there is high uncertainty, such as 0 -> 1 work, or responding to customer requests.
This article focuses on the ceremonies that are typically found in teams that are practicing scrum, as these are the most typical patterns. Agile teams running kanban or other processes will cover many of the same needs these ceremonies address, whether in the same format or not.
Making agile ceremonies work for you
Agile ceremonies are extremely powerful when run effectively, but can be counter-productive if they are not tailored to your team’s needs. In particular, blindly following a given format can have several negative consequences:
- Inefficient - you can end up wasting time on unnecessary and time-consuming meetings.
- Confusing - if ceremonies don’t align with your goals and wider company processes such as OKRs, then people can get confused on what they are meant to be doing, and why.
- Low engagement - you can face resistance from the team and stakeholders to participate in agile ceremonies if they don’t feel they are creating value.
Agile is a mindset, not a process, so there’s no “right” way to do it. If the ceremonies are accelerating your team then great! Carry on. If they are slowing you down, then change things up or abandon them.
Whatever your approach, here’s some general thoughts to bear in mind:
