What is Sprint Review Meeting? How to run it effectively?
A sprint review meeting is an informal gathering to showcase what was achieved during the Sprint. Learn more about sprint review meeting with this guide.
Think of sprint review meeting as a casual demo Friday, where you demo your finished feature/product to people and answer questions.
However, depending on how your company is set up, this meeting could also be more formal with the product owner explaining what tasks in the sprint where completed (and what weren’t) while the development team showcases them.
What is a Sprint Review Meeting?
The sprint review meeting is the third scrum ceremony. It is an informal gathering between the scrum team and the other stakeholders. The team takes this opportunity to show all the work completed during the sprint which gives the stakeholders a chance to see the feature to inspect and ask questions.
The goal of the sprint review meeting is to get feedback on the completed items and have a product backlog that is revised enough to make it a probable backlog for the next sprint.
Who should attend a Sprint Review Meeting?
The product owner, scrum master, and the development team are the folks who must attend a sprint review meeting. Other key stakeholders such as clients/beta customers, members of the sales team, and other business executives should also attend this meeting to provide feedback.
How long should a Sprint Review Meeting last?
Since this meeting is designed to showcase a finished feature and elicit feedback, the sprint review meeting shouldn't last for more than an hour for a one week sprint.
That means, if your sprint is four weeks long, the sprint review meeting shouldn’t last longer than four hours.
Sprint Review vs Sprint Retrospective
Teams often get confused between sprint review meetings and a sprint retrospective meetings. While they do sometimes sound similar, at its core they're have different purpose.
Below is a tabular column that explains the three major differences between a sprint review meeting and a sprint retrospective meeting.
Best practices on how to run a Sprint Review Meeting
1. Focus on the goal, not the number of tasks
Let’s be honest… Your burndown chart probably doesn't look like an ideal chart. Your team most likely has a few tasks in the sprint that aren't complete. And that's normal. They are after all humans too.
During the sprint review meeting, the focus should be to see if the overall sprint goal (that was decided during the sprint planning meeting) is met and not how many tasks were checked off.
2. Gather feedback
Giving a demo to people who have zero (or partial) context of what you’ve built is the easiest way to get actionable feedback.
During the meeting, the product owner should take ownership of asking questions and gathering feedback that can be used in future sprints.
3. Sprint reviews is not for retrospective
It is common for teams new to scrum to confuse a sprint review meeting with a sprint retrospective meeting.
A review meeting is where your team demonstrates all the hard work they put in, while a retrospective meeting happens after the sprint review meeting to introspect and find ways to improve the current process.
