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Summary

Our company runs two week sprints for our software development team. We have many projects our team shares with some being individual projects. We've noticed that when we end our sprint an hour or so before our sprint review meeting that we sometimes have problems demoing our software in the sprint review meeting.

Question

What is a good time to stop development before the sprint review meeting? An hour, two hours, a day, etc... What does Agile SCRUM recommend?

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  • It sounds to me as if you're doing everything right, but you're over-committing. If you can't finish the work (and that means, being ready to demo) in time for the review, reduce your projected velocity.
    – slim
    Sep 11, 2017 at 16:07
  • What do you mean by having problems?
    – Daniel
    Sep 11, 2017 at 20:24

1 Answer 1

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Scrum says nothing about this. You should hold the review as soon as practical after the sprint ends. That means after all the work is done, all tests have passed, and the team has had a chance to prepare for the demo.

This is all the scrum guide has to say about the timing of the review:

A Sprint Review is held at the end of the Sprint to inspect the Increment and adapt the Product Backlog if needed.

Notice that it says nothing about the timing. As with all things related to Agile, your team should decide what works best for your team.

Most of the teams I've worked on found it convenient to finish the sprint at the end of a day, and then use the next day for reviews, retrospectives, and planning the next sprint.


As an aside, it sounds like the real problem isn't in picking a time, it's in choosing a method to demonstrate what you've done that doesn't have dependencies on other teams. You should probably focus on solving that problem instead of trying to pick a new time.

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  • 2
    It makes no practical difference, but by the rules the sprint doesn't end until after the review, since "sprint" is the timebox that holds all the work + events and since a new sprint starts the moment the old sprint ended.
    – Erik
    Sep 12, 2017 at 7:23

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