Sprint review for remote teams

What is a sprint review?

A sprint review is a meeting held at the end of a sprint. It is the opportunity for the Scrum team to demonstrate the outcome of their hard work during the sprint. In this meeting, both the Scrum team and other stakeholders participate and share their feedback on the work done. This review is helping shape upcoming work and eventually plan ahead for the next sprint.

In a remote setting, sprint reviews happen online. Having a remote sprint review has some major opportunities for the team. Including stakeholders outside the company is much easier in a remote setting, as these people will probably be away from the office.

A remote sprint review also promotes the agile approach of working with customers on specific projects, versus trending to the more casual waterfall approach. Finally, it is way easier to include clients by incrementally sharing progress either via an online meeting or offline, as we can see below.

Synchronous remote sprint review

When both the Scrum team and the stakeholders are in similar time zones, the event can happen via an online meeting. Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams Calls, and other tools, are there to help an online meeting.

The Scrum team can share their screen and demonstrate the progress through a presentation or a live demo. Get feedback, keep notes, or debate towards the best next version of the feature in development.

Asynchronous sprint review

When team members or stakeholders are in different time zones, this is where an asynchronous sprint review can kick in.

The Scrum team can record a video of the delivered increment, covering any potential open questions and the decisions making process. Fortunately, there are tons of technologies to easily use this method. Tools like Loom can make it super easy to record and share an online presentation.

An alternative approach is to share a document on the delivered increment, offering details, designs, and attached screenshots. However, sharing a prerecorded video presentation is preferable.

With the sprint review material at hand, stakeholders can get back with comments and feedback online, at their pace. This can be done either through email or within a chat application, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams using threaded discussions.