Improvements through Scrum Ceremonies...

We all know Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation are the three pillars of empirical process in Agile development.

Our team works in a transparent way, processes are transparent and even practices are transparent. But how our team inspects and adapts?

Certainly there are well defined processes for Inspect and Adapt.

Daily Scrum: In this 15 minutes timeboxed activity, all the team members inspect progress toward the sprint goal in the form of answers of the three questions provided by each team member of development team.

• What I did since the last daily scrum?
• What I plan to complete by the next daily scrum?
• What are the obstacles or impediments preventing me from making progress? 

Based on the answers team synchronizes and adapts the plan for the work till next Daily Scrum.

Sprint review: Sprint review helps the Scrum team to inspect and adapt the product. During review team gets feedback from various stakeholders and based on that adapts what to do next.

Sprint retrospective: Sprint retrospective helps the team to inspect the processes/practices being followed and adapt accordingly. There may be something to continue, to stop or to start.

Backlog refinement: Generally teams do not count this ceremony as a inspect and adapt activity but I strongly believe that due to this ceremony, Product owner gets chance to prioritize the stories and gets to know the clarifications development team may need during next sprint planning.

So all set with the Inspect and Adapt activities! Now I need few answers from the readers.

•          If any impediment comes after the daily scrum, do we need to wait till the next daily scrum?
•          During development, for example some suggestion comes up during some implementation, should we wait till Sprint review?
•          During sprint if any team member comes across with a very effective open source tool which can save a lot of efforts and time, should he/she wait till the Sprint retrospective? And yes we should bear in mind that some teams follow 4 week sprint.
•          The Product owner senses the heat of the market and wants to add/remove some stories from the backlog, should he wait till next sprint?

You said it right! Inspect and Adapt are not dependent on any ceremonies. And that’s how we achieve “CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT” because we do not wait for ceremonies to take place first and then go for any improvement/adaptation.

I know enthusiastic team members want to see their great ideas start working in their sprints as soon as any such idea tickles in their mindJ. But sometimes other team members want to analyse and make sure that the point(s) suggested for improvement is valid/authentic for the team and the work being done. They want to take some time for a quick discussion on that. 

I suggest that the member who got the idea, should make a note, may be write that on a sticky note and place that on the team's board. (Sticky with a different colour works great to grab the attention of the team.) If there are distributed teams, the point can be sent to all for consideration. Team can have a quick discussion on that during some short break and sometime may ask Proof Of Concept from the team member suggesting the point. Once accepted by all, that point can be considered for the sprints as an improvement.