In my last post , I talked about tips for live sprint reviews. One thing I didn’t mention was videos and how useful they can be …

Why record the sprint review?

Some of the key stakeholders might not be able to regularly attend the meeting (e.g. sales, consultants who are primarily on site with customers, …). Recording the sprint review, gives us a mechanism of capturing feedback, even if a stakeholder can not attend the live review.

Record live review or record separate demos?

Recording the live sprint review is the easiest and least time consuming thing to do. A great thing about recording the live sprint review is that it will include the feedback conversations. The drawback is that the video could be up to 30 minutes long and if the stakeholder hasn’t booked time in their diary to watch this, they make struggle to find that time. You could edit the video and split it up into 1 video per feature - a 5-10 minute video is much easier to squeeze into a busy day and watch.

Another approach is to record the feature demos as separate demos outside the live sprint review meeting. You could do this before the live meeting which doubles up as a practice run for the live review. You can end up with a good quality, to the point, video demos. The downside is that the videos will not include the feedback conversations. However, because the videos will not include conversations that might be sensitive, these videos will probably be more feasible to use as a mechanism to capture feedback from customers.

No live reviews - just videos

It is feasible not to have live sprint reviews in a few of situations:

• When the key stakeholders regularly can not attend the sprint review meetings (e.g. sales, consultants who are primarily on site with customers, …). When you are at the stage where it is just the development team in the review meeting and maybe just one other stakeholder, it’s time to think of just doing videos.
• When there are multiple product teams, each wanting a sprint review and stakeholders time. The different product teams could be asking the same stakeholders for their time. So, we are asking a busy stakeholder for a multiple of 30 minutes. Different teams may have the same product owner and same scrum master. So, the scheduling of the review meetings can be a challenge. In this situation, videos may be a better approach.
• You may be doing kanban or scrumban rather than pure scrum where there isn’t a fixed sprint schedule. In this situation, you can do the videos immediately after a feature has been tested to capture feedback.

Who should do the video demo?

I prefer the developers to do the video demos. The developers will have worked hard to make the features and as a result, hopefully, some passion for the feature will come through in the demo. The product owner should help the developer script the demo to make sure it is targeted to the stakeholders.

Recording software

For recording live reviews, GoToMeeting works well. Camtasia works well for recording demos outside of the live review - it’s really easy to use and has great editing capabilties. Camtasia is a “paid for” product which I think is worth every penny but Jing is free and is a great start point. Jing is limited to 5 minute videos which actually forces the demo to be short and to the point.

Capturing feedback

A real danger with videos is that we lose the feedback - particularly if there is no live review. Remember the sprint review exercise is all about feedback, so, it is critical we get that with the video approach.

The product owner should drive the feedback, chasing stakeholders up for their thoughts.