Sprint Review Meeting


  1. What is a Sprint Review Meeting?
  2. Who should attend a Sprint Review Meeting?
  3. How long should a Sprint Review Meeting last?
  4. Sprint Review vs Sprint Retrospective
  5. Best practices on how to run a Sprint Review Meeting
  6. Quick Summary

What is a Sprint Review Meeting?

The sprint review meeting is an informal gathering between the scrum team and the other stakeholders. The team takes this opportunity to show all the work completed during the sprint which gives the stakeholders a chance to see the feature to inspect and ask questions.

Think of sprint review meeting as a casual demo Friday, where you demo your finished feature/product to people and answer questions. However, depending on how your company is set up, this meeting could also be more formal with the product owner explaining what tasks in the sprint where completed (and what weren’t) while the development team showcases them.

The goal of the sprint review meeting is to get feedback on the completed items and have a product backlog that is revised enough to make it a probable backlog for the next sprint.

Who should attend a Sprint Review Meeting?

The product owner, scrum master, and the development team are the folks who must attend a sprint review meeting. Other key stakeholders such as clients/beta customers, members of the sales team, and other business executives should also attend this meeting to provide feedback.

How long should a Sprint Review Meeting last?

Since this meeting is designed to showcase a finished feature and elicit feedback, this meeting shouldn’t last for more than an hour for a one week sprint.

That means, if your sprint is four weeks long, the sprint review meeting shouldn’t last longer than four hours.

Sprint Review vs Sprint Retrospective

Teams often get confused between sprint review meetings and a sprint retrospective meetings. While they do sometimes sound similar, at its core they’re have different purpose.

Below is a tabular column that explains the three major differences between a sprint review meeting and a sprint retrospective meeting.

Sprint Review Sprint Retrospective
1. The sprint review meeting focuses on what was built during the current Sprint. 1. The sprint retrospective meeting is focussed on improving future sprints in terms of the process.
2. Sprint review meeting involves other stakeholders in the meeting. 2. Sprint retrospective meeting involves the scrum master and the development team. Product owner is optional attendee.
3. Other stakeholders give feedback on the product that was built. 3. The scrum master and development team give feedback on how the team can improve the process as a whole.

Best practices on how to run a Sprint Review Meeting

1. Focus on the goal, not the number of tasks:

Let’s be honest… Your team almost always has a few tasks in the sprint that remain incomplete. They are after all humans too.

During the sprint review meeting, the focus should be to see if the overall sprint goal (that was decided during the sprint planning meeting) is met and not how many tasks were checked off.

2. Gather feedback:

Giving a demo to people who have zero (or partial) context of what you’ve built is the easiest way to get actionable feedback.

During the meeting, the product owner should take ownership of asking questions and gathering feedback that can be used in future sprints.

3. Sprint reviews is not for retrospective:

It is common for teams new to scrum to confuse a sprint review meeting with a sprint retrospective meeting.

A review meeting is where your team demonstrates all the hard work they put in, while a retrospective meeting happens after the sprint review meeting to introspect and find ways to improve the current process.

Quick Summary

Summary of Sprint Review Meeting

Vikash Koushik

Vikash Koushik

Product Marketing at Zepel.io