I want to make a Sprint Review for one of my Sprints using JIRA. I have no idea whether this can be created on JIRA. Can the Sprint Review for a Sprint be done in JIRA?
2 Answers
TL;DR
At heart, JIRA is just a ticketing system. It is not a substitute for interpersonal interactions or real-time collaboration, and absolutely not an effective substitute for the Sprint Review event in Scrum.
JIRA Tickets are Not Sprint Reviews
Even if you use its comment features, you can't substitute ticket-based comments in JIRA for a collaborative Sprint Review. The Scrum Guide clearly describes the Sprint Review as follows (bold emphasis mine):
The Scrum Team presents the results of their work to key stakeholders and progress toward the Product Goal is discussed.
During the event, the Scrum Team and stakeholders review what was accomplished in the Sprint and what has changed in their environment. Based on this information, attendees collaborate on what to do next. The Product Backlog may also be adjusted to meet new opportunities. The Sprint Review is a working session and the Scrum Team should avoid limiting it to a presentation.
While you could have an asynchronuous conversation in JIRA about a given work item, you can't make it into a collaborative working session, and would have to fight the tool's ticketing system metaphor to even approach making it something other than a presentation.
Successful Scrum practitioners generally use the Sprint Review for product/feature demonstrations, and treat those demos as part of a test-first approach during Sprint Planning. Using a ticketing system like JIRA does the exact opposite: it typically turns the "review" process into a status report of tickets completed, which is largely useless for:
- interactively inspecting the current Increment,
- understanding the value or implementation of the Sprint Goal,
- building real collaboration with stakeholders,
- holding real-time discussions, or
- creating two-way conversations about how to refine the product further.
If you think of the Sprint Review only as a "percent completed" status report, then thinking you can do this in JIRA is a logical (if incorrect) interpretation. However, this type of status reporting misses the essential aspects of what a well-executed Sprint Review should do, and is most definitely an agility anti-pattern.
First of all, Jira is a ticketing tool where you create and constantly define and update your backlog. What should be concentrated on during sprint review is a compete gathering of the team members; PM, developers, solution architects, designers, to demonstrate the efforts of the whole team. All team members are given the opportunity to speak about the work they have done during the iteration/sprint.