How Do We Run Our First Sprint Review?

Premise

The Sprint Review is a meeting where the Scrum Team presents information to the (customer especially) stakeholders about the increment of work that was completed during the last Sprint in order to get feedback about that work.

A secondary purpose of the Sprint Review is to:

Provide information on the Release Plan status by showing the results of work that has been completed.

Show stakeholders that the team is operating professionally and high performance, taking responsibility for their goals, commitments and the quality of their work.

Typically, the Sprint Review is held using tele-conferencing facilities so that everyone who has an interest can attend and so people who cannot attend can use a captured recording of the tele-conference to provide feedback at a later date. The Sprint Review is structured as a small set of “context setting” activities and a series of demonstrations showing the working system just completed. These demonstrations should not be confused with a sales presentation or a training session. If sales or training sessions are needed, they should be arranged in a separate meeting.

The content of a typical Sprint Review is described in the sections below. This information is relevant in the typical sprint where the team wants feedback on a set a new capabilities delivered. Sometimes other information is put in place for other kinds of work. For example:

A team doing pure maintenance work may not have anything to demonstrate to stakeholders, and thus no no feedback is required. The team could do an email Sprint Review in this case.

A team might be working on an Inception Sprint (or Sprint 0), which means progress toward a “release plan” is being reported as well as being used to determine what we have learned so far and what adjustments we need to make.

A team might be working on a final Release work, which for many means that defect arrival rates, for example, might be part of the Sprint Review.

Irrespective or the work is, a Sprint Review should be held.

Guidelines

The basic rule for Sprint Reviews is simple - functionality that isn't “done” per the “Definition of Done” cannot be presented - no exceptions.

Although the meaning of “done” can vary from organization to organization, it usually means that the functionality is completely engineered and could be potentially shipped or implemented.

If “done” has another meaning, make sure that the stakeholders understand it.

When doing the demonstration “done” might also mean that the demonstration shown using something that is “close to the production environment.” For a product development shop, it might mean something like “Demonstrations should be performed on End-User builds running on a clean machine.”

Be very careful about using a purpose built PowerPoint presentation to structure this meeting. Using PowerPoint (apart from being a potential waste of time generating the slides) typically gives the stakeholders the feeling that this is a more formal presentation, bordering on a sales pitch. This meeting needs to be different to this and so we need to be careful about signals we are sending when using PowerPoint. A better approach is just to use the artifacts that we are using to structure the demonstration. In other words, just show the Sprint Burn-down when talking about what happened during the Sprint, just use the Sprint Backlog to schedule each of the demonstrations one after another and so on.

Structure

Duration: Maximum of 2 hours for a 2 week sprint (10 working days).

Who: Scrum Team and Stakeholders especially their customers, management, users and anyone else who might be interested and have feedback.

Summary Agenda

Set overall context

Demonstrate done work

Gather feedback

Result: Feedback captured for the Product / Release Backlog to be prioritized so that the Backlog is ready for Sprint Planning.

Sample Agenda

Product Owner: Review project goals, timelines, milestones

Scrum Master: Review Sprint Goals, Sprint Burn-down, and discuss team learning that took place, especially for commitments not met.

Team Members: Demonstrate functionality

Stakeholders: Provide feedback

Team Members: Show evidence using artifacts, for example, showing quality measurements

Product Owner: What are we thinking will be in next Sprint

Scrum Master: Announce planned next sprint review date

Scrum Master: Thank participants

Checklist

When setting up the Sprint Review meetings (for the first time or ongoing), it may be useful to have a checklist to ensure a successful Sprint Review meeting. The following is such a checklist:

Before the Sprint Review

Set up a recurring calendar event, with virtual collaboration tool (WebEx, Lync, etc) for the Sprint Review.

By convention, the subject line of the email should help people understand the work being looked at. For example, “Sprint Review – Team name - (Area of Focus)”.

Participants invited include Scrum Team (Product Owner, Scrum Master, all team members), and the stakeholders, especially customer stakeholders.

Customers: The Product Owner is responsible for working arrangements with customer stakeholders. If it is the customer's first involvement in Scrum, ensure they understand their role (perhaps through an “Introduction to Scrum for Customers” session) before the Sprint Review.

Management: In terms of feedback provided by management, in addition to direct feedback on the functionality delivered, management should also ask about initiatives that the organization is driving. For example, if there is a renewed focus on “quality” management representatives might ask the team “how do you feel about the quality of the work you have completed?”

Before the actual Sprint Review meeting the body of invitation for this Sprint Review should be updated with the sprint goal and the sprint backlog indicating which items were “done”.

At the Sprint Review Meeting

The Sprint Goal is visible to everyone.

The committed backlog (sprint backlog) is accessible and visible to everyone.

The Team has prepared workstations, devices, and so forth to demonstrate the new functionality.

This is not a sales presentation, so its not about creating slick demonstrations. Focus on what you need to show in order to get feedback. This should not take a lot of time to prepare for: hours, not days.

Make sure your demonstrations can help remote people as well. If you are using a virtual collaboration tool check out what it looks like on the remote session.

Meeting Moderation

Scrum Master records the virtual collaboration session so others that wanted to see the session but were unable to turn up can review it at a later date.

The team presents the Sprint results and demonstrates the new functionality, backlog Item after backlog item.

If customers are involved, make sure that functional user stories (as opposed to technical / non-functional or environmental user stories) are demonstrated first.

Demonstrate the story from the customer's point of view. Treat the user story like a mini-script and start the demonstration by saying, “as a <role>, I have just done this and now want to do …”

All stakeholders can provide all types of feedback - comments, observations, criticisms, requests for new functionality, and so forth. This is the purpose of the review - to get feedback that is needed to make the product better. We need this data.

Changes to (or additions of) features may be made to the Product Backlog at this time. (Proposed changes that affect the current Release Backlog would have to be reviewed and estimated prior to committing them to the Release Backlog.)

If the team reports an obstacle that is not yet solved, escalate this type of obstacle to management.

Explain what could not be completed during the Sprint and why (for example, the team under-estimated effort, there were interruptions to address critical customer issues, and so forth).

Additional Reminders

Be sure the appropriate proprietary marking appears on any documents / PowerPoint slides used in (or sent out before) the Sprint Review or that the proprietary nature of the material shown in the Review is clearly stated.

Make sure the virtual collaboration tool (Webex, Lynx, etc) recording has been turned on before starting the Sprint Review introductions and is turned off before any non-Review-related discussion occurs.

If showing the Sprint Burn-down and other metrics takes more than ~5 minutes with any discussion expected, ask to return to this subject after demonstrations have been completed. Focus on getting feedback from the demonstrations.

If the team wants feedback from stakeholders on work not yet completed, make sure there is clear separation between this and demonstrations/discussion of completed work so there is no confusion on the part of stakeholders regarding the difference.

Product Owner Options

As a result of the Sprint Review, the Product Owner has a number of options:

Update the Product Backlog, for example:

Restore and prioritize unfinished functionality to the top of the Product Backlog

Reprioritize the Product Backlog based on feedback

Remove or lower priority of items no longer needed

Ask for a “Release” to implement the demonstrated functionality, alone or with increments from previous Sprints.

Stop the project

Request additional resources if necessary

Challenges of a Sprint Review

Watch for these issues as you do Sprint Reviews:

Team demonstrates work that is not “Done”

Team has not shown data indicating how they managed themselves

Team does not demonstrate the product from a user / value perspective

Team does not accept feedback well; gets defensive

Product Owner is surprised at Sprint Review

Stakeholders not available for Sprint Review

Team uses PowerPoint to demonstrate software functions

Team does not show product quality metrics

Feedback is not going into Product Backlog for consideration

Great review, but nobody knows where the project is