Eight things you should do in your Sprint Review

The Sprint Review is often referred to as the Sprint Demo. The meeting where the team demonstrates what they have done in the past Sprint. And nothing more than that.

This is gross underinvestment in your own Scrum Team and its success. The Scrum framework is founded on empiricism, with three main pillars:

• Transparency
• Inspection
• Adaptation

If we limit ourselves to just running a demonstration of the past Sprint, we are stopping at the Inspection point. We’re not adapting. It’s one-way communication. We throw our information at those that are present in the event but don’t incorporate the feedback into our Product Backlog. One of the lines in the Agile Manifesto reads “Responding to change over following a plan”. If we don’t gather feedback and change our path accordingly, we’re not adapting.

Imagine it in a different, more tangible (and horrible) scenario: your house is on fire. That's pretty transparent, everyone can see that. You’re screaming at top of your lungs “MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE”. And then… nothing. Your house just burns down as you watch, failing to adapt to the situation.

No one wants that, and everybody would call the fire department, right? Or at least get some water to make a start. That’s adapting. Not adapting to the circumstances is the equivalent of allowing our product to break down.