In scrum, there are a lot of ceremony that we perform. A routine that we follow, meetings we always have. All of them has a purpose, or we wouldn’t do them. That goes for the Demo too. But I have found that the demo in most of the cases degrade to being just a show-and-tell performed in front of patient parents that wants their children to be happy. First, let’s define the Demo. It is performed just after the sprint ends. Yes, it’s not a part of the sprint. The sprint is when you play the game, when you create the things you are going to deliver. Then you deliver…

The scenario is this. Your company has just started with Scrum. You are now in one of the first refinement meetings ever (some call them grooming) and you are trying to estimate the size of the user stories. You might have read my previous post about size, not time (read it here), and kind of think you understand the theory. But actually, you are probably so used to estimating time that you constantly fall back to this thinking, even if you try not to. You are not alone. Everybody does this. It is a shift in thinking you have to go through, and you just don’t do that overnight. So…

This is probably one of the harder concepts to grasp in Scrum. We keep repeating that story points is the size of the story, not the time it takes to develop it. And yet, this question is often asked:“But I am much slower, so how can I set the same point as you?” Stop it! You are still thinking of time! Look, if you are building a Lego model, and it contains 20 pieces, no matter how fast or slow you are, it is still 20 pieces. The size of the model doesn’t change. Now move this thinking over to a user story. They all have a finite number of…