Category: template

A Simple Scrum Sprint Review

January 21, 2009 by Peter Stevens

Picture courtesy of cole24@Flickr

At the end of the sprint, the Product Owner, Team and Scrum Master meet to review the progress of the sprint. The product owner has to evaluate the state of the project so s/he can decide what to do next. How does the Product Owner ensure that s/he gets a complete and correct understanding about the state of the project, including all inconvenient truths? Here is a simple agenda/meeting template to follow, to make sure all the bases are covered.

Last week, I introduced that concept of a Sprint Contract to define the parameters of the sprint. The factors Scope, Quality, Time and Cost will be familiar to any project manager. Scope is defined by the stories and in particular their size. Quality is defined primarily by the definition of done. Time is fixed by the sprint duration. An upper limit on the costs is set by the team size * sprint duration, after adjusting for absences and other tasks.

A simple sprint review needs to

1. Confirm that the team has delivered on its commitments
2. Confirm that the overall project is on track
3. Examine the functionality which has been delivered.

The Effective Sprint Planning Meeting

January 14, 2009 by Peter Stevens

Picture courtesy of Photocapy@Flickr

At the beginning of each sprint, the Scrum team and product owner negotiate the scope of the sprint. They have a limited amount of time to discuss and agree on the sprint backlog. The product owner wants functionality implemented properly and to invest development dollars wisely. The team wants a mandate it can fulfill. And everyone wants the meeting to finish on time! Here is an agenda (complete with a downloadable template) to follow so that your sprint planning will be successful.

Video tutorial: Advanced Excel template for Product and Sprint Backlog management

October 17, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Excel is one of the most popular tools for managing the backlogs of the Scrum process. There is a number of templates available and here is a screencast on using one of the advanced ones. This template was created by Petri Heiramo from Digia and includes facilities for managing both product and sprint backlogs. You can download this template on the page with the collection of Scrum templates and examples.

You might also like to have a look at the video tutorials on the simple product backlog template and simple sprint backlog template.

Simple Sprint Backlog Example

October 15, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

Update: Link to XLS fixed. Kudos to Jukka Laurila

Simple Product Backlog Example

October 9, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

Scrum backlog templates and examples

November 6, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

Bas Vodde collected and published examples and templates of the Scrum product and Sprint backlogs. Most of them are in MS Excel format. Some (XLS) include a lot of comments, some (XLS) are very colourful. Check them out, Excel can really cover most of the needs of the archived backlog tracking.

Cached templates
Here are the cached copies of templates that I reviewed on this website.

• Petri Heiramo's advanced product and sprint backlog template -
  • Video tutorial on using it

See Also

• Simple Product Backlog Example
  • Video tutorial on using it
• Simple Sprint Backlog Example
  • Video tutorial on using it