Sprint Review

Overview

Questions

• How do we conduct Sprint Review meetings?
• What do these meeting achieve?

Objectives

• Use Sprint Review meetings to demonstrate the Sprint Increment to the Stakeholders
• Have experience of and understand the task of Backlog Refinement.

6.1. Introduction

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In this episode, you will prepare for and conduct a Sprint Review Meeting. This is a recap from the Agile Fundamentals Course, where you learned that a typical sprint review includes:

1. Demonstration of completed work
2. Feedback collection
3. Alignment with the product vision
4. Celebration of achievements
5. Identification of improvements

6.2. Sprint Review Meeting

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At the end of every sprint the Scrum Master and Development Team will attend a Sprint Review Meeting with the Product Owner (P.O.). The P.O. may wish to also bring Stakeholders with them (e.g. members of their research team). This meeting is an opportunity for the Development Team to demonstrate work, discuss developer output and deliverables and gather feedback from the Product Owner and Stakeholders. If a demonstration is presented, a release of the product should be prepared. Alternatively, the development branch can be demonstrated instead, and a tag must be added to the commit used to conduct the demonstration so there is traceability. It is essential to track what versions of the product have been shown to the Product Owners. For this training course, you may wish to demo your product to a course Facilitator!

The Sprint Review meeting

Callout

Recap: Release Planning

In the Agile Fundamentals course under Release Plan section, you learned how to plan a release and worked toward delivering your first release, also known as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In this course, you will learn how GitHub can be used to organise, track, and present completed work through GitHub Releases.

6.2.1. Preparing the “Product Increment” for the Sprint Review on GitHub

Creating a Labelled Release

If your team has completed enough work to demonstrate progress to Stakeholders during the Sprint Review Meeting, then you can prepare a product release using GitHub Releases. A release acts as a snapshot of the work completed during the sprint and helps teams keep track of important project milestones.

Depending on the type of project, a release may include completed documents, Markdown (.md) files, images, research notes or other finished work.

Naming Releases

When creating a release, choose a meaningful title that clearly identifies the work completed during the sprint. For software-related products, version numbers are often used. However, for documentation-based products, such as this course, you should use editions instead.

For example:

• Sprint 1 Recipe Book Edition
• First Draft Edition
• Community Recipes Edition
• Research Notes Edition

Release Management

When producing a release, the “Draft release” feature of GitHub should be used to ensure releases are correctly recorded. Teams should include release notes summarising the work completed during the sprint. Release notes may include:

• completed tasks or Issues
• improvements made
• feedback addressed
• remaining work planned for future sprints

This helps maintain traceability and provides a clear history of project progress over time.

Callout

Reminder from the Agile Fundamentals Course:

Only work that has met the “Definition of Done” can be included in the Sprint Review.

“For this course, your team has assigned a pre-defined Definition of Done (DoD) by facilitator: a task is only considered ‘Done’ once it has been peer reviewed before being marked as Done on the GitHub Project Board.”

Challenge

Challenge 1: Prepare for the Sprint Review (5 minutes)

• Review the Sprint Backlog and choose stories to showcase in the meeting
  • Look at all stories or features completed during the sprint.
  • Identify which ones meet the “Definition of Done” and are ready for review.
  • If a task is blocked by another task, add a comment in the Issue comment section such as: Blocked by #IssueNumber.
• Create release on GitHub
  • Decide in your team if there is enough work that you can create a release. If not enough work is ready for a release, prepare any other work that is demonstrable to Stakeholders. For example, planning decisions, documentation structure, diagrams, formatting improvements and/or decisions taken during the sprint.
  • Scrum Master Share your screen with all participants and create a GitHub Release following the instructions above. You can also refer to the GitHub documentation here for a step-by-step guide with screenshots on how to create a release in GitHub.
  • Add release notes summarising the work completed during the sprint.
• Plan the Demo Sequence
  • Decide the order in which stories will be presented.
  • Assign team members to demonstrate each story.
• Scrum Master: Make sure all development team memebers are engaged during this process.

Callout

Important: GitHub Release

You must practice creating a release using the GitHub Releases feature at least once during this course, even if in Challenge 1 you feel your work is not sufficient to create a release. In such cases, you should still create a release to demonstrate and practise the process using whatever completed work you have available.

6.2.2. Demonstration of Completed Work & Feedback Collection

The key question at this meeting is whether the latest Product Increment meets the current requirements. It also gives the P.O. a chance to capture feedback so it can be used to improve the Product Backlog and keep requirements up-to-date. (We will do more work on Backlog Refinement in the next episode.)

Challenge

Challenge 2: Conduct a “Sprint Review” Meeting (5 minutes)

• Demonstrate the Product Increment to the P.O. and Stakeholders (course Facilitator) and ask for feedback.
• Add any suggested improvements, missing work or issues identified during the review to the Product Backlog.
• In early sprints, a demonstration might focus more on planning decisions, document structure or organisation of work rather than a fully completed product.
• Celebrate the Development Team’s achievement by recognising and appreciating team members.

Callout

Relax: Don’t forget, your team only had limited time to complete the Sprint work. The aim of this course is to learn how Agile practices and GitHub tools support collaboration and project organisation not how to write good Recipe Book.

Key Points

• Sprint Review Meetings give the team the chance to demonstrate the latest Product Increment.
• GitHub Releases can be used to organise and present completed work.
• Sprint Reviews are useful for checking whether the product is meeting the current requirements and to assist with refining the Backlog.