What are the main activities in Scrum?

The sprint itself is the main activity of a Scrum project. Scrum is an iterative and incremental process and so the project is split into a series of consecutive sprints. Each is timeboxed, usually to between one week and a calendar month. A recent survey found that the most common sprint length is two weeks. During this time the team does everything to take a small set of features from idea to coded and tested functionality.

The first activity of each sprint is a sprint planning meeting. During this meeting the product owner and team talk about the highest-priority items on the product backlog. Team members figure out how many items they can commit to and then create a sprint backlog, which is a list of the tasks to perform during the sprint.

On each day of the sprint, a daily scrum meeting is attended by all team members, including the ScrumMaster and the product owner. This meeting is timeboxed to no more than fifteen minutes. During that time, team members share what they worked on the prior day, will work on today, and identify any impediments to progress. Daily scrums serve to synchronize the work of team members as they discuss the work of the sprint.

At the end of a sprint, the teams conducts a sprint review. During the sprint review, the team demonstrates the functionality added during the sprint. The goal of this meeting is to get feedback from the product owner or any users or other stakeholders who have been invited to the review. This feedback may result in changes to the freshly delivered functionality. But it may just as likely result in revising or adding items to the product backlog.

Another activity performed at the end of each sprint is the sprint retrospective. The whole team participates in this meeting, including the ScrumMaster and product owner. The meeting is an opportunity to reflect on the sprint that is ending and identify opportunities to improve in the new sprint.