Friday 22 July 2011

Its a review not a demonstration

At the end of a Sprint the team get together with the client to review the work that has taken place over the Sprint in a meeting called the Sprint Review.

On some of our projects this meeting has been under-utilised with the developers completing a demonstration of the system.

Why is this a problem?  Well, the demonstration is a scripted display of the work that has been completed.  The developers will, completely subconsciously, click on what they know works and keep to a minimum any time spent demonstrating things that don't work so well.

This means that the client walks away without fully understanding what has been delivered and therefore can't accurately specify what is required during the next Sprint.

Sprint Reviews should be interactive sessions.  The team should show each story in turn with the client asking questions and interacting, hands on, with the system.  This way both the client and the team can agree on what is really done and can together understand what the contents of the next Sprint may be.

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