A Scrum Team prepares a polished slide deck for the Sprint Review, presents for fifty minutes, takes two questions and closes. Everyone is complimentary and the Product Backlog is unchanged afterwards. What has gone wrong?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework medium
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The options
Correct The Sprint Review is a working session in which the Scrum Team and stakeholders collaborate on what to do next, and the Product Backlog may be adjusted as a result — a presentation is exactly what it should avoid being
Correct. An unchanged Product Backlog after a Sprint Review is the tell: if nothing about the plan moved, the inspection produced no adaptation and the event was a broadcast.
Not correct Nothing has gone wrong — the purpose of the Sprint Review is to demonstrate the Increment to stakeholders
Wrong, and it is the most common misreading of the event. The purpose is to inspect the outcome of the Sprint and determine future adaptations; showing the Increment is how the inspection gets its raw material, not the point of the meeting.
Not correct The Sprint Review should have been run by the Product Owner alone, since they own the Product Backlog
Wrong. The Scrum Team presents the results of its work and the whole team, with its stakeholders, works out what to do next. The Product Owner owning the Product Backlog does not make them the sole speaker.
Not correct The Sprint Review overran its timebox
Wrong on the facts. Fifty minutes is comfortably inside the four-hour maximum for a one-month Sprint. What went wrong is what happened inside those fifty minutes.
Why
Judge a Sprint Review by what changed, not by how it looked. The Scrum Team and stakeholders review what was accomplished and what has changed in their environment, and on that basis they collaborate on what to do next — which regularly means adjusting the Product Backlog to meet new opportunities. It is also the second to last event of the Sprint: the Retrospective follows it and concludes the Sprint.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Sprint Review
- What it says
- The Sprint Review is a working session and the Scrum Team should avoid limiting it to a presentation.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 1 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
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