Does Sprint Review makes any sense anymore?

Does Sprint Review makes any sense anymore?

I was frequently asked “We are doing CI/CD, Product Owner and few key stakeholders have already seen what is coming out of this Sprint or some of the features are already in production(delivered to market), then does having Sprint Review at the end of every sprint still make any sense?”

Before telling my take on the question, let me tell the 2 major reasons why this is a very common question asked to most of the Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches.

1.      Agile and Scrum has evolving every single day and many engineering and process practices like Automated Testing(TDD, ATDD, BDD, Performance Testing etc.), CI/CD, In-Sprint demos/Approvals just to name few are becoming the integral part of software development. As a result, Development Team, Product Owners and Stakeholders need not wait till the end of the iteration or sprint to take the product to market and get early market feedbacks, which was one of the primary goal of any Agile Methodology.

2.      While coaching our teams we also advice teams to avoid meetings which is not giving any value.

The common understanding of many people who are working with Scrum is that the Sprint Review is to showcase or sometimes only Demo the stories we have delivered in the sprint and get the feedback from Product Owner and Stakeholders. As this is happening well in advance before the Sprint Review, they think it’s a meeting which is not giving any value, so it can be avoided.

So, does Sprint Review has lost its importance? OR Is Sprint Review more than showcasing or only demonstrating the stories done by the team to get the feedback from Stakeholders?

Actually even though showcasing and the Demo of the stories delivered in the sprint and getting feedback on it is a part of the Sprint Review, it is has much higher significance and purpose.

All the Scrum Events are proposed keeping in mind that it takes care of all the three pillars of Scrum: Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation.

In case of Sprint Review,

Transparency: During the Sprint Review, teams will not just be showcasing the stories they have delivered but instead they will be showcasing how the product looks and works after the team has achieved its Sprint Goal.

Inspection: Based on the showcasing or Demo done by the team, Stakeholders along with Product Owners involving the Development team will have a look at the impact, its pros and cons on the product and also look at the feedback (if any) already received from the market.

Adaption: Based on the inspection done, Product Backlog will be adjusted by the product owner to increase the Return on Investment in the coming iterations/ Sprints.

By delivering early to market and following good engineering practices, we can build high quality software, get faster feedback on each feature but nothing can replace a good interaction between the Scrum Team and Stakeholders to look at the product on whole, review the change in product due the present sprint goal and how the adapt to achieve higher value in the future sprints.

S Jaya

ScrumAlliance Certified Scrum Trainer/Process Consultant

7y

Hi Ravikiran, I really appreciate u initiated very nice point, if we r thinking from scrum perspective not organisation specific, then sprint review is INFORMAL opportunity, not just from product increment demo perspective. it's also an oportunity to bring together dev team stakeholders customers PO together for other discussions about how sprint went, challenges. this is also the opportunity to discuss further Product backlog items to bring in subsequent sprints, market thing, ROI, releases, competitors....... think from collaboration point among them......because in traditional approach getting hold of stakeholder/customer/client/users was challenge. In scrum every events have very specific PURPOSES, we need to understand them throughly . when we talk from CI/CD perspective, then sprint length matters, short sprints works in that case, Kanban will give you flow but for structure Scrum would be better option IMHO. Can't type much on this forum, but we can discuss further. Very nice point you raised.

Naveen Kumar Singh

Principal Consultant @ Agilemania | Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) I Accredited Kanban Trainer I Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) Trainer | Teaching Extreme Programming (XP), TDD, BDD, DevOps, Agile Testing and Clean Code

7y

It does make sense. Because Review is not equal to Demo.

Sanjay Kumar

Agile Transformation Coach, Enterprise Agile Coach, Author

7y

Agree with you. If the team is practicing CD, there are good chances they have moved beyond Scrum in the agile space. It may be time to break free of the timebox and adopt Kanban Method where items flow independent of each other. In other words, no need to batch requirements either.

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