Comments on: How to Give a Great Sprint Demo

By: Prakash

Prakash — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:54:21 +0000

I like the demo but with a pinch of salt, with my experience, the “demo day” is huge overhead time spend in the project.

-Preparing the software for demo
-Practicing for the demo (as per you)
-Sometimes preparing special hardware for the demostration purpose only.

All this shows ok, the software works as per the PBI.

having a functional software every sprint end is not always realistic, sometimes a software needs refactoring or “break all bones before rebuilding” all that does not happen in a sprint time and in such cases software are not in a demonstrable state.

The only people who are happy with the demos are the product managers who likes to see nice nice thing all the time.

Peer engineers knows the problem and would rather would like to spend time on getting the software working rather then spend time demostrating and preparing for demos.

all in all, with all the software processes i have gone through, i find the scrum process to be very cumberson one.

The process is not really agile, the only part of aglity is ability to be prepared for a change in spec. otherwise, Scrum is not really an interesting process.

By: Ellen Gottesdiener

Ellen Gottesdiener — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:56:29 +0000

Great tips Richard, thanks!

Another suggestion: have the customer/product owner “run” the demo him or herself.

thanks for your blogging!
~ ellen

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:55:36 +0000

@Steven – Thanks for the kind words. I agree, there’s no reason you have to choose between exciting and entertaining and relevant and informative. The most relevant and informative demos ought to also be the most exciting, assuming you’re really building a valuable product.

@Bob – Good point. I like to rotate the demo role around the team usually. But one interesting case I saw was a team where the Product Owner did the demos. The demo wasn’t the team showing her what they built–it was her showing the rest of the stakeholders what *her team* built.

By: Bob Hartman

Bob Hartman — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:34:22 +0000

[...] Oh, and while we’re on the topic, if you want to know how to have a great demo, read this blog entry. It has some awesome ideas that all teams should try to follow. The only thing I would add is to have someone other than a developer or tester be able to try the software during the demo. Too many horror stories about how things were missed when developers went through demos too fast! [...]

By: Steven M. Smith

Steven M. Smith — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:25:32 +0000

Excellent advice written with style and grace.

I especially like the idea of an exciting and entertaining demo, which, contrary to some people’s opinion, can still be relevant and informative.

I also like your advice about the importance of practice. Any presentation, which is what a demo is, benefits from practice.

Nice work, Richard. I like your writing a lot.