What Are Sprint Reviews and Sprint Review Meetings?

Sprint review in its most unchanged form is a meeting that the development team, scrum master, and the product owner and stakeholder will be attending. The team would also give a demo on the product that is under discussion and will also determine which projects are finished and which need to be finished so to speak. The very purpose of the sprint review meeting is for the team, customers, and stakeholders the work that is being accomplished over the sprint while comparing it to the commitment that is given at the beginning of the sprint.

The ultimate purpose of sprint reviews

The ultimate purpose of the sprint reviews is to get valuable feedback from the stakeholders based on the user stories that are done during the sprint. The very definition of 'Done' includes the testing done from deployment to production, acceptance testing, and anything else that is required to aid the users for testing the product according to the ultimate purpose that it was supposed to serve.

Who are the stakeholders in the sprint reviews?

The basic understanding of the stakeholder during the sprint reviews is that it can be anyone who is interested in the functional topics that are covered during the demonstration of the work that was done during the sprint. These can be managers, users, colleagues, and future clients. At the end of the day, this responsibility befalls on the shoulders of the product owners that they have to identify those people and invite them to the sprint review that is currently being conducted.

Is sprit review supposed to be a demo conducted by the product owner?

It is highly mistaken among various people who don't understand what sprint reviews are; these are not some sales pitch thrown by the product owner or designer it is more like a collective entanglement of the support, design, development, and implementation team to discuss the potential future of the product. So, to answer the question; No it isn’t only about the product owner giving substantial review or demo of the product before an audience. The mere responsibility of the product owner here is to present the work done during the sprint review and demonstrate all of it to the stakeholders.

There are no obligations during the sprint review that only the owner of the product has to do the demo, anyone can do it but ultimately it is more streamlined if the product owner does it themselves. A product owner that is providing the team with insights from before the first sprint should eventually know what the whole team did and what kind of work was during that time period. They must also be confident in the quality of work and comfortable enough for sharing it before the whole team.     

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Sprint review Vs sprint retrospective

Each sprint would end with a two-part sprint review meeting. Such a meeting is designed to start with the reviews of the customers and then end with the team retrospective. Both of these elements would only occur on the last day of the sprint, to begin with.

Sprint increment review

There could have been a single deployment or many other deployments during a sprint which lead up to the increment to be inspected. When the meeting is done and the product has been reviewed through and through then the presentation of the Increment is intended to elicit feedback and foster collaboration of the systems.

The length of the event would depend on the number of sprint months that need to be covered. At the very least the length of the sprint meeting is about 4 hours but as explained earlier it can be cut short or elongated as per the requirements of the ongoing scenario. The responsibilities pertaining to various participants taking part in the meeting are already divided.

Usually, it is the responsibility of the scrum master that the event takes place at its dedicated time and all the attendees already know about the roles they have to fulfill and thoroughly understand how to get on with it. And also it is the responsibility of the scrum master to make sure that everyone understands the allocated time that they have for winding up the matter during the meeting.

Read more: 30+ Agile Scrum Master Interview Questions

Following are some of the sophisticated elements of the sprint review;

• The attendees of the meeting include the scrum team and stakeholders while the major portion of the people are the product owners
• The product owner will have to explain such as what has been done and what still needs to be done considering the development of the product and its completion
• The development team upon taking the room will be defining what went wrong during the first sprint and what was done to counterfeit these anomalies
• The development team would also demonstrate the work that has been done and would also answer the questions about the increment
• The product owners would discuss the backlog of the product as it stands and the likely target audience for the product is also explained in detail along with dates based on progress to date
• Later on, the whole group will be collaborating with each other and sharing a valuable insight, to begin with, and also devising a dedicated path as what to do next
• Review of the marketplace and the product is also done such as what are the possibilities of success for the product that is about to be launched and how the market has changed recently; is it a good sign or not
• Another review is done directly to the timeline, budget, potential capabilities and the marketplace for the next anticipated releases of functionality and the capability of the product

Thus at the end of every meeting a backlog of the product is created that contains all the highlight and potential information that is important to grasp to be used in the next sprint meeting and all its essentials to be discussed accordingly.  

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