Great Sprint Demo: the recipe

As I mentioned, you should not tie sprints and releases together. I thought to add a few notes about what will make a Sprint Demo really great. Luckily Moran Haviv, our legendary Project Manager at Delver, wrote a great recap I thought to share with you:

Why Sprint Demo?

· The primary purpose of the Demo is to communicate, share and celebrate what everyone managed to do in the last sprint and what is the value of it for the user/Organization; In other words: what are we doing here and Why are we doing it?.

· Collect valuable feedback to make sure our users will love our product as much as we do!

· Teams gets to show off with their output/artifact to everyone; (even if the software has no UI it might yet deserve to be presented by a good story).

A few guidelines for preparing great demo

• Tell a story. Center your demo around a realistic user solving a real problem. The point is not just to show that the software works, but to show that it’s valuable.
• What is a good Story? Or How can you tell it :
  • Use a meaningful relevant theme;
  • Demonstrate sequence of events as the user would experience them (tell the story);
  • Use realistic data and characters—use examples and names from your user community or members of the development team;
  • Make it Exciting and Entertaining
• Keep it short. focus on what’s interesting and what’s valuable about your feature (you don’t need to exhaustively cover all your acceptance criteria).
• Prepare. Create any necessary test data.