Sprint Review

Get live feedback quickly

  • From staging environment with realistic data
  • To the stakeholders, from developers
  • PSR explained to stakeholders

Why

For knowing whether the development of the product satisfies the needs of the end-users and other stakeholders, the Product Owner and Development Team must get feedback on the product frequently. The Sprint Review meeting at the end of each sprint serves this goal.

Prepare for success

  • Invite stakeholders well in advance. We use a steady two-week sprint schedule, so stakeholders can put the reviews of all upcoming sprints in their agendas.
  • Product Owner[1] accepts the finished user stories and bugfixes during the sprint.
  • Deliver a high quality product at the end of each sprint. It’s better to have 80% of the planned user stories really finished, than to have all planned user stories “finished” for 95%.
  • Product Owner and Development Team have prepared a demo of the finished user stories and bugfixes.

How

  • Explain the goal per user story[2] and demo it from the staging environment.
  • Explicitly ask for feedback from the stakeholders per user story.
  • Take time to discuss when necessary.
  • Present the top of the product backlog[3] to the stakeholders, and also get their feedback on that.
  • Present the highlights of the Project Status Report as well.

Definition of Done[4]

Feedback received from stakeholders on the delivered product, on the overall status of the project and on the goals for the upcoming sprint(s).

Real Life Example

For the custom development of a new webshop for consumer products, a number of internal stakeholders were present during the Sprint Review of the third sprint. One of the stories was about being able to define a readable URL in the CMS for product pages. During the review, the representative of the content team and the technical application manager got into a discussion about the different feedback they were giving. The Product Owner gave room for this discussion. During the discussion, it came to light that it was very important to manage the redirects of old product URLs to the new product pages. This was functionality that had not been in scope so far. Due to the fact that this came to light this early in the project, we were able to incorporate it into the first release.

Notes

  1. Product Owner - The Product Owner plays a crucial role in the development of a great software product. He or she is responsilble for maintaining the Product Backlog.
  2. User Story - A user story describes a functional goal from the perspective of an end-user. Who wants to do what with the product, and why?
  3. Product Backlog - An ordered list of the work to be done in order to create, maintain and sustain a product. Managed by the Product Owner.
  4. Definition of Done - A shared understanding of expectations that the Increment must live up to in order to be releasable into production. Managed by the Development Team.