Agile Ceremony Reference

Scrum ceremonies with timeboxes, participants and purpose — scaled to your sprint.

Reference for the Scrum ceremonies — sprint planning, daily standup, review and retrospective — with Scrum Guide timeboxes, participants and purpose, plus a live timebox scaler for your sprint length.

What are the four main Scrum ceremonies?

Sprint Planning starts the sprint by setting a goal and selecting work. The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute daily sync. The Sprint Review inspects the increment with stakeholders. The Sprint Retrospective reflects on how to improve. Backlog refinement is ongoing rather than a fixed event.

The rhythm of a Scrum sprint

Scrum runs on a fixed set of events that create transparency and regular chances to inspect and adapt. This reference lays out each ceremony — its cadence, who attends, its purpose and its timebox — and scales the recommended lengths to the sprint length you actually run.

How it works

The Scrum Guide expresses event timeboxes as maximums for a one-month sprint and scales them down for shorter sprints:

Sprint Planning  → up to 8 hours for a 1-month sprint (scales)
Daily Scrum      → 15 minutes, fixed every working day
Sprint Review    → up to 4 hours (scales)
Retrospective    → up to 3 hours (scales)
Refinement       → ongoing, ~10% of Developers' capacity

A two-week sprint therefore caps Planning at about 4 hours, the Review at 2 hours and the Retrospective at 1.5 hours, while the Daily Scrum stays fixed at 15 minutes. Treat every figure as a ceiling: a well-run team often finishes earlier.

Tips and notes

  • Timeboxes are maximums, not targets — protect focus by ending early when the goal is met.
  • Keep the Daily Scrum to the Developers and tied to the Sprint Goal; it is a re-planning event, not a status report to managers.
  • Hold the Retrospective after the Review so feedback from stakeholders can feed improvement actions.
  • Budget refinement continuously rather than as one big meeting, so the next sprint’s items are always ready.