Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Development Tools Scrum Basics Scrum Artifacts Scrum Wrap-up

Lainey Odette
Lainey Odette
18,618 Points

When do the various Scrum events take place in a sprint/project?

It wasn't clear when each connection point takes place within a sprint or project. I am curious about a sample timeline of the connection points. For instance, it seems crazy that all of these take place for each sprint if your team does each sprint in one week. Do you always do a Retrospective? How often does a Backlog Refinement take place? Thank you!

1 Answer

What's important is that the Scrum Events take place, in a certain order, within the time boxes allowed.

For example, citing the Scrum guide in concern to the Sprint Retrospective, "This is at most a three-hour meeting for one-month Sprints. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter."

If you have a one week sprint as you've suggested, your Sprint Retrospective should be much shorter than the three-hour time box. Each Scrum Event has a maximum allotted time, or time-box, and should take less than that in relation to the length of the sprint.

The order of events would be:

  1. Sprint Planning, 8 hour time-box
  2. Sprint, 4 week time-box; with Daily Standups, 15 min time-box
  3. Sprint Review, 4 hour time-box
  4. Sprint Retrospective, 3 hour time-box

The Product Backlog Refinement "event" is a little different. While it was presented in this course alongside the other events, it is described slightly differently in the Scrum Guide. Cited here, "During Product Backlog refinement, items are reviewed and revised. The Scrum Team decides how and when refinement is done. Refinement usually consumes no more than 10% of the capacity of the Development Team. However, Product Backlog items can be updated at any time by the Product Owner or at the Product Owner’s discretion."

The Product Backlog Refinement event as described in this course is one way to accomplish that. If it is 10% of your capacity than you would need to decide as a team how to meet that guideline. At that point it may help to remember refinement isn't necessary for all of your Product Backlog Items, at all times. Perhaps only the higher priority ones to keep it from taking too much capacity from the team.

You can create a sample timeline that follows those constraints, perhaps by dividing each time-box by 4 (since a 1 week sprint is 1/4 of the sprint time-box.) However it's up to your team as a whole to find what works for the team.

(https://www.scrumguides.org/)