Who attends what event in scrum?

The Scrum framework describes three accountabilities; product owner, scrum master and developers – but who attends what event in scrum? Detailed below are the four events: sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review and retrospective.

Sprint Planning

The full Scrum team – that is the product owner, scrum master and the developers – all attend sprint planning. The product owner presents the current product backlog and answers any questions the team might have regarding it. The scrum master observes, ensuring any questions are resolved and facilitates the meeting to ensure a successful outcome. Based on these interactions with the scrum master and product owner, the development team should determine what it can realistically deliver and make a forecast for the sprint based on this.

Daily Scrum

Anyone working on the sprint backlog attends daily scrum. The scrum master is accountable to ensure the event happens and is within the 15-minute time-box but is not a required attendee. Product owners and other stakeholders are not required attendees and can potentially disrupt the purpose of the meeting. The developers should be mindful not to turn the meeting into a status update or reporting session. The primary focus must be to inspect progress toward the sprint goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the sprint backlog.

Sprint Review

Required attendees at the Sprint Review are the Scrum team and key stakeholders as invited by the product owner. The stakeholders invited by the product owner may vary from sprint to sprint depending on the content of the product increment created. As the key forum for stakeholder feedback, it is vital that all members of the scrum team attend so that they can hear the same information first-hand and be able to answer questions regarding the sprint and product increment as necessary.

Retrospective

As the inspect and adapt event for the Scrum teams process, all members of the scrum team are required to attend the retrospective; the developers, the scrum master and the product owner. Having all members of the team present promotes whole-team accountability, transparency and trust. Likewise, it is considered dysfunctional to have anybody outside of the Scrum team attend the retrospective as this could jeopardise the ability of the team to create the safe environment required to allow open, trusting communication.