Skip to content

Agile Ceremonies
What The recurring meetings that drive a sprint: standup, grooming, planning, and demo.
Owner Project Manager facilitates; the team participates.
Triggers Daily and at fixed points in the sprint.

Summary

These are the standing meetings that keep a sprint moving. The daily standup surfaces status and blockers, grooming readies the backlog, planning commits the next sprint, and the demo validates what was built with stakeholders. The per-sprint retrospective is intentionally not here: it is replaced by the Monthly Retrospective. Each ceremony is time-boxed, because their value comes from focus, not length.

Full detail

Daily Standup

  • Frequency: daily. Duration: 15 minutes.
  • Participants: Project Manager, Developers, QA.
  • Each person covers: what I did, what I will do next, any impediments.
  • Rule: any extended discussion is deferred to a "parking lot" conversation immediately after. The standup stays on status and blockers only.

Backlog Grooming

  • Frequency: once per sprint, around mid-sprint. Duration: about 1 hour.
  • Participants: PM, Developers, QA, Product Owner (CEO optional).
  • Covered in full as a lifecycle phase: see Backlog & Grooming.

Sprint Planning

  • Frequency: second-to-last day of the current sprint. Duration: about 1 hour.
  • Participants: PM, Developers, QA, Product Owner (CEO optional).
  • Covered in full as a lifecycle phase: see Planning & Estimation.

Sprint Demo / Review

  • Frequency: last day of each sprint. Duration: about 1 hour.
  • Participants: PM, Tech Lead, Developers (as needed), QA, Product Owner, CEO (optional), stakeholders.
  • Agenda:
    1. Tech Lead demonstrates completed stories.
    2. Stakeholders review and approve completed items.
    3. Approved stories are scheduled for production deployment.
    4. Unapproved stories move to the next sprint for rework.
  • Outcome: stakeholder validation of deliverables and alignment on release plans.
flowchart LR
    A[Daily Standup<br/>every day, 15 min] -.recurring.-> A
    B[Backlog Grooming<br/>mid-sprint, 1 hr] --> C[Sprint Planning<br/>2nd-last day, 1 hr]
    C --> D[Sprint Demo / Review<br/>last day, 1 hr]
    D --> E[Monthly Retrospective<br/>see its own page]

Why no per-sprint retro here

The reflection that a per-sprint retro would provide is consolidated into the Monthly Retrospective, which takes a broader view across multiple sprints (what shipped, team mood, longer-term improvements). This avoids running two overlapping reflection meetings.

Example

In a two-week sprint, the team runs a 15-minute standup each morning, kept to status and blockers. Around mid-sprint, grooming readies the next sprint's stories against the Definition of Ready. On the second-to-last day, planning commits the next sprint based on capacity after spillover. On the last day, the demo walks stakeholders through the completed stories: two are approved and scheduled for deployment, and one is sent back to the next sprint for rework. No per-sprint retro is held; that reflection is saved for the monthly retrospective.