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How to make the sprint review meeting worth your while

02 Feb, 2015
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My work allows me to meet a lot of different people, who actively pursue Scrum. Some of them question the value of doing a sprint review meeting at the end of every sprint. Stakeholders presumably do not “use” nor “see” their work directly, or the iterated product is not yet releasable.
Looks like this Scrum ritual is not suited for all. If you are a person questioning the value of a demo, then focus on your stakeholders and start to demo the delta instead of just your product. Here is a 3-step plan to make your sprint reviews worth your while.

Step 1: Provide context
Stakeholders are not interested in individual user stories. They want to see releasable working software they can use and work with. That is were the value delta is for them; in practical services and products they can use to make their lives a little bit better than before.
So the thing you should do in the sprint review is to explain the completed stories in the context of the iteration and how this iteration will add value to the upcoming product-release. Providing the context will make it easier for stakeholders to give your team the feedback it is looking for.
Step 2: Demo the delta
Search for the abstraction level on which the user is impacted by the story you have completed, even if this means combining stories to demo as a whole. This is especially useful if you are working in component-based teams.
It will enable you to explicitly illustrate the added value from a stakeholder perspective after the change. It’s not just about adding an input screen or expansion of variables. It’s about being able to do something different as a stakeholder.
Think about the possibilities given the new additions to the system. Maybe people can be more effective or more efficient saving time, money and energy. If possible try to explicitly show the effect of the delta on the stakeholder, for instance by measuring key variables in the before and after situation. Seeing the explicit effect of the changes will get your stakeholders fired up to provide your team with additional ideas and feedback for your next release.
Step 3: Ask for feedback
The goal of the sprint review is to generate feedback. Often, this won’t happen automatically and means you have to explicitly ask for it. Doing it wrong is to do the review without interruption and to conclude by asking: “any questions?” This will certainly not evoke people to participate in a group discussion as posing questions is, unfortunately, still seen by many as a sign of weakness.
To counter this group dynamic, you should be the one asking the questions to your audience. Example stakeholder focused questions to generate feedback might be; “what are your thoughts on improving this feature further?” Or “How would this fit in your day-to-day routine?”
By doing so, you will lower the barrier for others to start asking questions themselves. Another tip to turn around the question dynamic is to specifically target your question to a single stakeholder, getting the group out of the conversation.
Up until now these steps helped me a lot in improving my sprint review meetings. These 3 simple steps will let your key-stakeholders be the subject of your review meeting, maximizing the chance that they will provide you with valuable feedback to improve your product.

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