Sprint Review Before — After

Hello my name is Alexander and I am a founder of Agile Instinct,

In todays post I would like to talk about the future posts on medium.The posts will be going into the direction of analyzing the tools that we receive with the Scrum framework.How the tools can be used and what is the intended use of those.

Scum Values

• Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage

Scrum Events

• The Sprint
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective

Scrum Artifacts

• Product Backlog
• Sprint Backlog
• Increment

For this I would like to setup a context and then analyze with you on how the tools help us to resolve some of the dysfunctions in the team. If you think my view is not right, let me know I am free to learn. For starting I would like to tell a story from my newest observations. I am now supporting a team with 8 Developers, 1 PO and myself. I just started to work with this team and just observing and checking out how the people work and what the problems were in the past. They have an external Scrum Master who is really good. What was changed or fixed in the last months by this Scrum Master? After the first talk with the SM I realized he had no time to really to connect with the people and just tried to fix the process. However this was necessary and where fixed really good. The first thing he established is to change the Sprint Review.

Sprint Review before:

Scrum Team get together with PO and Managers and try to go over each and every task, to just close it. The managers some kind of stakeholders, however here it was the boss of all the members of the scrum team. I would assume we all know this kind of Sprint Reviews. One of Agile Coaches I know whos name is Ralf Kruse, he says to such things Scrum Theatre. The drawbacks are crucial of those reviews.

Sprint Review after:

The Scrum Team started to run this event. The Team decide what they can show to the stakeholders and invited participants to the review. Of course the showed features, stories should be part of the Sprint Goal. So all can see directly whether the Sprint Goal was successfully reached. The other stories, bugs are just presented as a list and will only be discussed if a participant is interested in. After the presentation the feedback is gathered and PO notes it. I was really impressed as one of the stakeholders just started to ask about a feature and how to make it better.

Sprint Review conclusion:

The Sprint Review today runs well, however there are still leftovers to fix, but they are not of a big issue right now.

I think we as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches should have an understanding of the tools we use. Frameworks might be helpful, but by knowing why we are doing some events like Review, Daily Standup,or the most hated by all ”Retrospectives”, we can achieve much more.I will continue writing about the so-called tools and why they exist and what problems do they solve.Hello, my name is Alexander and I am a founder of Agile Instinct.