At the end of a sprint cycle, two meetings are held: the “Sprint Review Meeting” and the “Sprint Retrospective”. This section describes the Sprint Review Meeting and next section describes the Sprint Retrospectives. One must understand that the objectives of both meetings are very different.
At the Sprint Review Meeting:
- Attended by Product Owner, Scrum Master, team and other stakeholders as required
- The objective of this meeting is
o To review the work that was completed
o The planned work that was not completed
o If the team is on track
o Get Feedback
- Present the completed work to the stakeholders (“the demo”)
- Incomplete work cannot be demonstrated
- Four-hour time limit
- Feedback from participants are reviewed and recorded. The product owner should consider the feedback as potential backlog items
Best Practices at the end of Sprint review
- Items which were not completed are added back to the Product Backlog.
- Product Owner should assess the priorities of feedback and add to backlog if necessary
- If the customer wants to feel the product, the Product owner should consider making a partial release (Alpha or Beta release) so that the customer can play around with the product.
- It is a good practice to record the demo and make it available to the participants who could not attend the review
Handing Sprint Reviews
- Communicate effectively: Team members who are most able to communicate effectively with the team, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and stakeholders should present, so that they can represent the team in front of the customer.
- Fluent speaker: Another approach is to record the demonstration before the meeting to allow the developers to create the recording at their own pace in the language of the meeting, or to have a fluent speaker speak over the recorded demonstration.
- Scheduling for teams with overlapping work hours: Make sure all team members of the distributed team, regardless of the time zone, can complete their work and prepare for the demo within overlapping work hours.
- Scheduling for teams with no overlapping work hours alternate meeting time: The distributed team holds one sprint review meeting during the normal workday for part of the Scrum team and holds the other sprint review meeting during the normal work hours of the other part of the Scrum team.
- Keeping track of the stakeholder comments: During the sprint meeting, the distributed team needs to capture these comments so the product owner and the developers can decide which ones they will act on.
- Remote demonstrations: Distributed teams should test their tools ahead of time to be sure the distributed meeting will run smoothly, without network poor performance. The team can also consider making the recordings available for download before the demonstration meeting and discussing them through a teleconference.
- Services may vary by location: Set up a single machine with a standard configuration that everyone uses during the demonstration meeting. Before the start of the meeting, distributed team members can access the machine (remotely or locally) to bookmark links, set up scripts, and do a quick dry run of their presentation