Coach’s Corner

The sprint review is a collaborative event for the Scrum team and stakeholders. It’s an opportunity to huddle with people outside the team to evaluate the state of the increment. As Scrum masters, we must constantly find new ways to create transparency around what’s happening so that we give the Scrum team an opportunity to make informed decisions about what should happen next.

In order to ensure that your sprint reviews are as valuable as possible, prior to your next sprint review, ask yourself these questions:

• Are the right people involved in sprint reviews so that the product backlog can be adapted in an informed way?

• Is it clear why we did what we did this sprint?

• Does everyone attending the sprint review know why the Scrum team is building this product?

• Are we going to give stakeholders any misconceptions about where we truly are?

• Is the entire Scrum team in alignment about what has happened during the sprint?

• Are we recycling the same agenda as last time?

The answers to these questions may help you spot areas where your sprint review is lacking. It might be worthwhile posing these questions to the rest of the Scrum team to gain their perspectives, too.

In the next chapter, we turn our attention to the sprint retrospective, an event that focuses on continuous improvement. The retrospective is vitally important to the success of any Scrum team.