My new Scrum Team decided to delay the Sprint Review
What did we learn?
Recently I shared my experiences with a new Scrum Team that did not meet their Sprint Goal in their second Sprint. Then someone suggested to extend the Sprint:
I advised against it. I suggested to have a Sprint Review with an incomplete increment and be open on what the team stumbled upon. The team only partly followed my advise. They decided to not extend the Sprint, but to delay the demo/Sprint Review with two days. They felt strongly about showing a working product, something they could be proud off.
I was unhappy with the choice of the team. I would have liked to have the Sprint Review to elaborate on what they did do, explain the challenges discovered and how the team has planned to adapt. True transparency. One of the pillars of empiricism.
But naturally I can’t forbid them to do this. As a Scrum Master I serve the team. I am a coach, I don’t do top-down instructions.
Two days later the team had a fully functional product to show. They were truly proud of what they achieved and the demo was awesome with many enthusiastic responses. The team made a good first impression as it was the first demo showing an end to end flow.
So, was it so bad that we postponed the Sprint Review? Well, for one it wasn’t really a review. It was a demo. We didn’t discuss the bigger picture, we didn’t touch upon what to do next, we didn’t discuss what went well and what issues we ran into. I would have liked to discuss this during the Sprint Retrospective, but we already had that one. Hence we need to discuss this in a different way.
What we were able to do was to add feedback from the demo/Sprint Review as Sprint Backlog Items of the ongoing Sprint. We could do this because I advised the team to deliberately have a modest Sprint Goal and conservative Sprint Backlog. This allowed us to add items addressing feedback from the Sprint Review.
So how bad was it that we postponed the Sprint Review? I’d say 3 out of 10 (1 is no problem and 10 is seriously bad). We did make a good impression which elevated the team. I showed that I am their coach and that I wish to have a team making their own decisions. But we could have gotten more out of the Sprint Review. Now it was a demo only. We couldn’t properly “retro” the review and at the Sprint Planning we didn’t have the feedback from the review to take into account. I am sure we will be able to improve on this though.
Did you like the article? Then it would be awesome if you’d clap 👏🏻. I am also very keen to learn what you think about this topic.
My twitter profile is https://twitter.com/WJAgeling
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