When the sprint ends in Scrum, it's time for the team to present its work to the Product Owner for approval. This process is known as the sprint review meeting. In this meeting, the Product Owner goes through the stories assigned for the sprint and asks the team to present the work. The Product Owner checks the work to make sure it has addressed all the acceptance criteria outlined in the product backlog item. (In some cases, a team may have met all the criteria, but the end product still isn't what the Product Owner wants. In such a case, the team would be awarded points for creating a product that satisfied the acceptance criteria, but the Product Owner would likely re-write the story for the team to tackle in the next sprint.) Even if 99 percent of a story is completed by a team, the Product Owner must reject it as incomplete. Many teams find that the finishing touches on a product are often the most labor-intensive and time-consuming, so awarding partial credit for unfinished work can contribute to a misleading velocity. This is the “inspect” phase of Scrum's inspect-and-adapt approach to software development.
Following the sprint review meeting the team holds a scrum retrospective meeting with the ScrumMaster. At this time, the team discusses three things: what went well, what didn't go well, and what improvements could be made in the next sprint. Because the Product Owner does not attend this meeting, it's an opportunity to speak candidly about successes and failures. This is an especially important opportunity for the team to focus on its overall performance and identify strategies to improve its processes. Similarly, it's a valuable chance for the ScrumMaster, who can observe common impediments affecting the team and work to resolve them. This meeting, which is usually time-boxed at three hours, represents the “adapt” phase of the inspect-and-adapt approach.
In short, the Scrum method of agile software development uses the sprint review and scrum retrospective meetings to reinforce Scrum's emphasis on transparency and communication. By formalizing communication with these meetings, Scrum ensures that every team member is informed and connected.
