Running a powerful Sprint Demo has always been important because it can significantly impact the Sprint Review’s success. I think an excellent sprint review tells a story of the stakeholder’s language.

Experience has shown me that to achieve a great result from the Sprit Review; I have to divide the Sprint Review into three parts.

1. Before the ceremony

Based on the Sprint goal, I have to decide who need to be in the meeting. I have to consider topics, words, and phrases to use or focus on or avoid (especially terms that have caused tension in the past). Then I will list all completed stories in the meeting agenda and sent it to the Product Owner, Developers and Stakeholders.

Usually, I ask Developers to have backup plans for any complex functionality they want to demo.

2. During the event

At the beginning of the ceremony, I will introduce Developers and Stakeholder(s) to establish a personal connection between the Developers and Stakeholder(s). then I will connect the “business why” to the work’s priority and goal. After that, I ask each Developer to demonstrate the product increment and reveal the work’s quantitative value against the business goal and any learnings in understandable terms. Based on my experience, stakeholders’ language rarely matches the technical language native to Developers. Then, each Developer or I will ask open-ended questions to engage the stakeholders in dialogue on the developer value.

Also, I will be taking note of tips that need to talk about them during the Retrospective meeting that can improve Sprint Review meeting quality.

3. After meeting

Based on the company policy, I run Sprint Review on Google Hangout meet, and I have to send the access link of the recorded meeting video to all the Scrum Team and Stakeholder(s) at the end of the meeting.

Also, I have to update the Sprint documentation page on the Atlassian Confluence.

Reference

The Featured image is under Creative Commons license (https://www.flickr.com/photos/91261194@N06/49739351821); thanks, Jernej Furman, for sharing this.