Contents
Tips on how to conduct a Sprint Review for internal use by Scrum teams. As opposed to a review that might be organized for an external audience such as stakeholders.
Here are some guidelines for having the most effective Sprint Review activities.
Written in 2016-2017:
This is part of a series of articles that I originally wrote in 2016-2017 and were only published on private internal company wikis. I am publishing them publicly for the first time in 2019, here on my blog.
What is an Internal Sprint Review ?
- For use primarily by the Scrum team to review and demonstrate the work they completed in the Sprint. As opposed to an externally facing Stakeholder Sprint Review which is designed for the needs of stakeholder’s outside the Scrum team.
- Is open to anyone interested in reviewing the Sprint’s accomplishments.
Learn More:
- Agile PM book – Chapter 10 Showcasing Work and Incorporating Feedback > The Sprint Review, location 4356.
- Scrum Guide – Scrum Events > Sprint Review, page 11.
- Certified Scrum Master (CSM) class – Slide 89
- Scrum Roles & Responsibilities
Length of Meeting:
- Time boxed
- 1 hour for each week in Sprint
| Sprint Length | Sprint Review Meeting Length |
| 1 week | 1 hour |
| 2 weeks | 2 hours |
| 3 weeks | 3 hours |
| 4 weeks | 4 hours |
Learn More About Length of Meeting:
- Agile PM book – Chapter 10 Showcasing Work and Incorporating Feedback > The Sprint Review > Figure 10-3: Sprint review meeting to sprint length ratio, location 4410.
- Certified Scrum Master (CSM) class – Slide 89
Facilitator: Scrum Master
- Schedules meetings.
- Facilitates the meetings.
Scheduling:
- Next to last activity on the last day of the Sprint.
- Ideally Sprint Retrospective is the last activity on the last day of the Sprint.
- Conduct both Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective before you finalize your Sprint Plan, because:
- They are both essential inputs in to a good Sprint Plan.
- Are critical parts of the Inspect and Adapt process of Scrum, and other Agile approaches, used to embrace continuous improvement.
- For example, conduct your Sprint Review on the Tue afternoon of the last day of the Sprint.
None or very little preparation:
- To minimize the time spent on overhead and meetings, try to spend no time on preparation.
- Because you use your Sprint Backlog as your meeting agenda and team members discuss and demo what they worked on, you don’t need prep or slides.
- Sprint Review is focused on complete work.
- No PowerPoint slides are needed.
Meeting Agenda:
- Use your Sprint Backlog.
- Simply go around to each person and have them review what they completed in the Sprint.
- Demoing working software and solutions where appropriate.
- In Jira, VSTS or other Scrum tool, you can use the Sprint views, or create a query and sort work items by person.
- Discuss lessons learned from the work, new work items created related to the work completed, etc.
- The Scrum Product Owner can review what’s coming next. In the next Sprint, next release, new work items, etc.
- Stakeholders and others outside the Scrum team can ask questions and provide feedback.
Attendees:
- All Scrum team members.
- Having the Scrum Product Owner participating with questions and feedback, is absolutely essential. Because the Product Owner is responsible for accepting Features as completed.
- Is open to anyone interested in reviewing the Sprint’s accomplishments.
- The Scrum Master is responsible for creating a wiki page to share the results of the Sprint Review.
- Keep it simple.
- Use Sprint Review wiki page template to save time.
- You can share a video recording, if you’d like.
Summarize the completed work:
- In a simple bulleted list, based on input from the team.
- You can include copied links from work items in Jira, VSTS or other Scrum tool, if you’d like.
- You can include links to wiki content.
- You can include links to shared systems running the latest build.
- The Scrum Product Owner can also handle this section.
- The Scrum Master (SM) and Product Owner (PO) should collaborate on how they’d like to share the Scrum team’s work.
Encourage Feedback & Follow up:
- Scrum Product Owner (PO) & Scrum Master (SM) work together to encourage discussions and feedback.
- Follow up on feedback and input, in the form of:
- Product Owner creating new Backlog items for the team to plan in a future Sprint.
- Scheduling follow up meetings to deep dive.