Category: demos

My First Agile Project Part 3: Viral Videos and Bad Jokes in Scrum Demos

September 15, 2008 by mattgrommes

Picture courtesy of karindalziel@flickr

Welcome to the 3rd part of my series on my first agile project. This time, I'll be talking about every introverted programmer's favorite part of Scrum, the end-of-sprint Demo. More specifically I'll talk about how we cracked wise, showed internet videos, heckled each other, annoyed our management, and occasionally showed off the work we had completed during the previous sprint.

Even though we usually dreaded them, our demos almost always went off okay and we all came out alive. If you're not familiar with them, the demo is where the team shows off the work they've done during the previous sprint. We were doing 4 week sprints so we usually had quite a few things done by the demo. It's sometimes the first chance your teammates have to actually see what you've been doing and to to catch up the rest of the team in a more concrete way than the daily stand-up meeting. It's also where you're supposed to get the feedback of the stakeholders and customers involved in the project. With our billing application project, we were interacting with a bunch of different departments in the company so we had a lot of stakeholders. In theory, all of these people will see the product and give feedback. In reality, this doesn't always end up working like you'd hope. Getting your demo right is much more important than we initially thought.