> almost two first weeks of a sprint almost whole organization is working on a demo for the previous sprint - that was beyond insane.
Wow. You're right, that's beyond crazy.
What frustrates me is that demos can be very useful, if done right, but if you're doing them because "We do Scrum, here look at this certificate I got from Scrum Alliance saying that I'm a 'Certified ScrumMaster®', see?!" like the artefacts of Scrum are magical ceremonies that will cleanse you of your software sin...
For example, we create a small video demo of a feature story as part of the story development, and we make it available for our business team (who are on the opposite side of the world) immediately. This gives them a chance to flag the occasional oversight on our part sooner, and we can fix it sooner. It works really well for us in terms of ensuring quality, but also for keeping the business team aware of what we're doing.
But if it didn't, then we should iterate on our process (like bloody Scrum says to do) and stop doing them.
>For example, we create a small video demo of a feature story as part of the story development, and we make it available for our business team (who are on the opposite side of the world) immediately. This gives them a chance to flag the occasional oversight on our part sooner, and we can fix it sooner. It works really well for us in terms of ensuring quality, but also for keeping the business team aware of what we're doing.
so far there is nothing in that paragraph specific to Scrum :) Doing demo sooner in order to get feedback and chance to fix sooner is more toward Agile. Doing demo just because it is end of sprint is Scrum. Agile and Scrum are two pretty opposite things :)
Wow. You're right, that's beyond crazy.
What frustrates me is that demos can be very useful, if done right, but if you're doing them because "We do Scrum, here look at this certificate I got from Scrum Alliance saying that I'm a 'Certified ScrumMaster®', see?!" like the artefacts of Scrum are magical ceremonies that will cleanse you of your software sin...
For example, we create a small video demo of a feature story as part of the story development, and we make it available for our business team (who are on the opposite side of the world) immediately. This gives them a chance to flag the occasional oversight on our part sooner, and we can fix it sooner. It works really well for us in terms of ensuring quality, but also for keeping the business team aware of what we're doing.
But if it didn't, then we should iterate on our process (like bloody Scrum says to do) and stop doing them.