In one of the projects, we have business stakeholders signing off completed user stories in the Daily Scrum.
There are instances where we will not have any stories to demo in the Sprint Review, as they've all been gone over during the Daily Scrums. We cancel the Review.
The Scrum guide clearly says that we need to have these separate meetings.
Please give your inputs on canceling the Sprint Review.
I would give the following comments to your practice.
Daily Scrum:
The daily Scrum is a meeting for the team members to discuss if it is possible to reach the sprint goal. In my opinion, there is no space for Stakeholders to review certain user stories.
Sprint Review:
I wouldn't cancel the meeting. Referred to the Scrum Guide, demo the user stories, which are done, is not the only item on the agenda.
Suggestion:
In a good Scrum team, there is in any way a lot of contact with the stakeholders. I would define an additional bullet in my Definition of Done: Reviewed the functionality with affected Stakeholders.
It's up to you to decide. But I recommend leaving the agenda list of the Daily Scrum as it is.
A few things to consider:
First, let's start with the best: you have super-engaged stakeholders. That is so awesome! And nothing in Scrum says you have to wait until the end of the sprint to show completed work to stakeholders. I don't think it can be overstated how wonderful it is that your team and stakeholders talk frequently!
Personally, I wouldn't do it at the daily scrum. The daily scrum is for the team to sync up. I can see that knowing if a key stakeholder is happy with the work could be useful info for in my daily scrum, but I would do it before. Personally, I'd be nervous that the stakeholder conversation would crowd out the conversations that are supposed to be happening in the daily scrum.
Lastly, I want to encourage you to push further and get more out of it. The idea of sign-off can be problematic in scrum. Because you don't want ambiguity in signoff, you usually consolidate that decision into one person. This can limit your view to one stakeholder, when there are actually many. Signoff also usually frames work in a pass / fail context. In Scrum we want feedback. If you are meeting every stakeholder's every need on the first try, that is suspicious (largely because that is probably an impossible task). This is where is is still important to have that review. Have every stakeholder who is interested attend. Hear all of their feedback. Decide how that impacts your backlog - what do you keep, what do you set aside. This is where the benefits of scrum really shine through!
