Agile ceremonies: the complete guide
Agile ceremonies are the recurring, timeboxed meetings that give a team its rhythm — planning, the daily scrum, review and retrospective. Four or five, explained.
Sprint planning is the ceremony that opens the sprint: the team agrees a sprint goal and turns backlog items into a plan it believes it can finish.
The daily scrum is a 15-minute check-in where developers re-plan the next day against the sprint goal. A coordination meeting the team runs for itself, not a status report.
The sprint review is the ceremony where the team shows working product to stakeholders and gathers the feedback that reshapes the backlog. It's a working session, not a demo.
The sprint retrospective is the ceremony that closes the sprint — the team inspects how it worked and commits to improvements. Here's where it fits, then the deep guide.
Backlog refinement — still called grooming — is the ongoing work of getting items ready before the sprint they're built in: clarifying, sizing, splitting, and ordering.
"Events" and "ceremonies" are the same meetings under two names. Events is the Scrum Guide term; ceremonies is colloquial. And there are four — or five. Here's why.