The Sprint review meeting

The Sprint review meeting also sometimes called the customer demo is held towards the end of the sprint and it's an opportunity for stake-holders, product owner and team to review progress made in the sprint.

Ideally the product owner will have selected the user stories they would like to see completed and this is their opportunity to tick these user stories off and enforce that all important definition of done (see my previous blog all about the importance of having a definition of done and the importance of enforcing it.

What ever your definition of done and acceptance criteria you should have a potentially shippable release of code.

Ideally the review meeting should be kept informal and all members of the Scrum team should attend along with stake-owners, management, customers the Product owner and something I like to do is invite members of other scrum teams/development teams along to observe (This can also be a good thing to do in the retrospective from time to time and helps to share practices and promote good ideas within an organisation)

As with all Scrum ceremonies the review should be time boxed - usually between one and two hours is more than sufficient for a two week sprint.

One of the things I like to do is to put the product owner in the driving seat of the application... Not always possible but it really works well if/when you have an engaged PO (which of-cause they always are!).... However even if your not that lucky you tend to find that the mere act of doing so helps to foster better PO engagement. You also tend to find that the stakeholders see the PO as a member of the team and even that the PO defends or explains their planning priorities more readily rather than leaving it to the development team to do! Remember it should be the PO that is driving the selection of user stories and deciding what does and very importantly does not get done not the development team.

Remember it’s a review… Not just a demo. Based on the review meeting you should take the opportunity to revisit the backlog talk about effect on dates and future planning.