Stage 3 · Lesson 4 of 8

Sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives

Many teams work in : fixed cycles of one or two weeks. Sprint planning at the start agrees what the team will do. A review or demo at the end shows what was done.

A , or retro, asks what to keep and what to change about how the team works. Other teams use instead: a continuous flow of tickets across a board, with fewer fixed meetings. Ask your buddy how your team does it.

Prepare for each meeting: know the status of your tickets before planning, and bring one concrete observation to the retro. Retros are the safest place for a junior to suggest improvements.

Common trapsitting silently through every retro for months, or raising a problem as the fault of a person rather than of a process.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 2 cheat sheet entries come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it

Resources for this stage

Start with· follow one of these

GuideFree
Atlassian Agile Coach
Atlassian · Beginner
Short, practical pages on standups, estimation, sprints and retros, whatever tool your team uses
GuideFree
The Scrum Guide (2020)
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland · Beginner
The original definition of sprint events in half an hour, so the vocabulary makes sense

Practise

Atlassian Team Playbook
Write your own user manual and read your team's working agreements with ready-made plays
BBC Learning English
Five to ten minutes a day of workplace English if it is your second language

Keep handy

GitLab Handbook: Communication
A real company's rules for async writing, meetings and chat, to compare with your team's
Google Technical Writing Courses
Free short courses on clear technical writing for tickets, messages and docs

Also worth your time

Shape UpGo deeper
A different way to plan work than sprints, useful for understanding why teams choose their process