I’m a proponent of calling things what they are. Blame it on my background in taxonomy: organization and classification are strong with this one.
As a Scrum Master – someone who is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide – I ensure my language matches what’s in the guide.
Which is why I refer to the meetings in Scrum as “events,” not “ceremonies.”
A ceremony is a prescribed act, a performance.
An event as an occurrence. Loose in nature, it is any noteworthy happening.
When the events of Scrum become ceremonies, they lose their meaning.
An example is Daily Scrum. It can easily move from a planning event for the developers to inspect and adapt progress towards the Sprint goal into a status update performance.
Or Sprint Retrospective. You might have the ceremony of “what went well/what could be improved” and identify helpful changes. But you lose the heart of the event, which is addressing those changes as soon as possible for meaningful improvement when it is just a performance and not a plan of action.
I’ve seen Sprint Planning become a ceremony of assigning work and Sprint Review become a performance of functionality rather than what both events are: a collaboration on upcoming work.
Scrum events are intended to be participatory. The Scrum Guide describes the intention of the event without prescription. It is up to the team and the Scrum Master to ensure that intention and value is met. That the meeting is more than a performance, of going through the motions, but is a noteworthy time to inspect and adapt.
And why you won’t find the word “ceremony” in the Scrum Guide.
Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash
One comment
Comments are closed.