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First Sprint Review, Demo and Retrospective

On Friday, 4 April, we will have the first Sprint Review, Sprint Demo and Sprint Retrospective. Some preparation is of course necessary.

Outline of this Canvas page: a brief overview is followed by the required preparation for the Sprint Demo. Then comes outlines of the internal sprint review, the sprint retrospective and the slack time. Last but not least, comes the schedule for the demo, and for the retrospectives that will be guided by a teacher this time.

Overview

Thursday, 3 April, during the day: all teams prepare for the internal Sprint Review and for the Sprint Demo.

Friday morning, 4 April, from 8:05 through 9:50 - Sprint Review for all teams, in the team rooms.

Friday before lunch, 4 April, from 9:05 to 12:00 (including breaks) - Sprint Demo for all teams in Ka-Sal B (Peter Weissglas). This Sprint demo will be in English.

Friday afternoon, 4 April: sprint retrospectives and slack time. Some teams may also have shifted the Sprint Review to the afternoon. For some teams, the order of events this afternoon will be different, since a teacher will guide the team's retrospective. See the schedule at the bottom of this Canvas page. 

For Sprint Retrospectives with teacher guidance: meet the teacher by lift A, floor 4, at exactly the specified time. The teacher shows the team to a suitable conference room.

Preparing for the demo

All teams prepare a very short talk and a (longer) exciting demo. The team also prepares for questions and suggestions from the audience.

In each team, all members must be prepared to do the presentation and demo. Before the time comes for the team to start, one person will be selected by the teacher to actually give the presentation and demo. The selection will be made randomly, with dice or a similar method.

Generally, see the chapter "How we do sprint demos" in the course book (pages 79-82).

A recommended 12-minute template for each team is as follows. The times may vary, but: if a team spends 4 minutes or more before getting to the demo, the presentation must be cut short to make room for the demo.

  1. Introduction to the product: what the team is creating. Length: 1 minute, with 1 presentation slide.
  2. Sprint summary: what was the sprint goal, did we achieve it, and if we didn't: why not? Length: 1 minute, with 1 presentation slide. Why things went wrong (if they did) can be very helpful to other teams, and could make this part a little longer (perhaps with an extra slide if necessary).
  3. Live demo of the product prototype. Make sure to demo all stories that the team has finished. You can demo several stories together if the team finished many small stories. Length: 5 minutes. You may optionally have 1 presentation slide listing user-stories (with the unfinished ones marked clearly). The demo is important - make time for the demo!
  4. Questions and suggestions from the audience Length: 5 minutes. Questions and suggestions are important - make time for them, prepare for them.

In some cases, one or two team-members may be unable to perform the demo. As an example, this could happen if the demo requires software that some team-member cannot install (such as, Windows software which doesn't run on MacOS). Then it is OK that some other team-member screen-shares the product, while the selected person talks about what we see.

Video clips are allowed but not encouraged. A live demo is preferable.

Internal Sprint Review

The internal sprint review is more detailed than the demo. Please see the book, page 80-82. The recommended time for the internal sprint review is 45 minutes. Please make sure that the team takes a break after the internal sprint review.

At 13:00 or later on Friday, all teams will have scheduled retrospectives guided by a teacher. The recommended length for a Sprint Retrospective in this course is 55 minutes.

Sprint Retrospective

The Sprint Retrospective is the most important Scrum event, according to Henrik Kniberg's book. See the chapter "How we do sprint retrospectives", pages 83-94. Here follows is a brief summary.

This meeting is about methods and ways of working. Technical discussions should be deferred to another meeting.

First thing: select a secretary. The Scrum Master and the Product Owner have special roles already. Therefore, one of the others should be secretary for the retrospective.

The Scrum Master summarizes the sprint in no more than 1 minute. State the sprint goal, did we achieve it, was there any important events or decisions?

Do "the rounds". Each person gets to say, without being interrupted, what was good, what the team might try next sprint, and what could have been better. Any discussion is deferred until after "the rounds".

After "the rounds", it is usually clear what the most important thing is, and the team can start discussing that. The focus should be, how can we make the next sprint better?

Near the end, the Scrum Master gives a short summary of the most important discussions, with help from the secretary. The end result should be three groups of bullet points that the team agree on:

  1. Which methods were good - make sure we continue to do them.
  2. Which new methods should we try next sprint (up to three items, trying too many new things at once doesn't work).
  3. Which methods didn't work for us (so we can stay away from them).

The first two groups of bullet points are positive, and contain good things that the team should do. The last group is negative, with things that should be done differently.

Alternative Sprint Retrospective method

There are many ways to do a retrospective. Here's one that is not described in the book.

Everyone gets a pad of post-its and a whiteboard-marker. Ball-pens and pencils are frowned upon, as they tend to encourage minuscule writing that requires a magnifying glass to decipher.

One of the team members makes headings on a nearby white-board for "good", "problems" and "to try". Each team member then writes things on post-its, one thing on each post-it: good things to keep doing, problems that needs addressing, and suggestions for things to try. Put all post-its on the whiteboard, under the heading that seems most appropriate. There is no prescribed order for putting the post-its on the whiteboard: each team member can decide to do it whenever a post-it is finished, or to put them all up when the inspiration for writing has run out.

The team then groups the post-its, so that post-its about the same thing are joined into a group. When a group of post-its is formed, draw a line around the group for clarity. If there is any hesitation about which post-it (or group of post-its) to discuss first, the team does dot-voting. In dot-voting, each team member gets four dots to put near the most pressing thing (post-it or group) on the whiteboard. The four dots can be put all on one item, or spread out more or less completely. No-one may put more or less than four dots on the whiteboard.

Near the end, the Scrum Master summarizes and the team agrees on bullet-points as described previously.

Slack Time

You need to rest between sprints. If you always sprint, you are in effect just jogging. (from the book)

During slack time, you can work at a leisurely pace, with things that do not contribute specifically to any user-story (Product Backlog Item). Reflect on the results from the demo, internal sprint review and the retrospective. You can also read up on the latest tools and APIs, or discuss nerdy stuff with colleagues.

This week, please meet up with one or two other teams for part of your slack time, to discuss your product prototype and get more detailed feedback. Use the following times and pairs.

  • Meetup at 13:15: Eliza - Feedforward - Sigmoid.
  • Meetup at 14:45: Autoencoder - Backpropagation, Inference - Recurrent.
  • Meetup at 16:00: Convolution - Decisiontree,

Schedule for the first Sprint Demo

  • 9:10-9:15 - introduction by F Lundevall
  • 9:15-9:30 - team Autoencoder
  • 9:30-9:45 - team Backpropagation
  • 9:45-10:00 - team Convolution
  • 10:00-10:15 - break
  • 10:15-10:30 - team Decisiontree
  • 10:30-10:45 - team Eliza
  • 10:45-11:00 - team Feedforward
  • 11:00-11:15 - break
  • 11:15-11:30 - team Inference
  • 11:30-11:45 - team Recurrent
  • 11:45-12:00 - team Sigmoid

Schedule for guided Retrospectives, Friday, 4 April, 2025

For all Sprint Retrospectives with teacher guidance: meet the teacher by lift A, floor 4, at exactly the specified time. The teacher shows the team to a suitable conference room.

  • 13:35-14:30
    • Team Autoencoder, guided by Robert R., in meeting room Alain.
    • Team Backpropagation, guided by Fredrik L., in meeting room Alonzo.
    • Team Inference, guided by Voravit T., in meeting room Tahoe.
  • 14:35-15:30
    • Team Convolution, guided by Robert R., in meeting room Alain.
    • Team Decisiontree, guided by Fredrik L., in meeting room Alonzo.
    • Team Recurrent, guided by Voravit T., in meeting room Tahoe.
  • 15:35-16:30
    • Team Eliza, guided by Robert R., in meeting room Alain.
    • Team Feedforward, guided by Fredrik L., in meeting room Alonzo.
    • Team Sigmoid, guided by Voravit T., in meeting room Tahoe.