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“Sprint reviews are waste of time! Let’s skip them!”
– anonymous ignorant

Another ignorant statement: Why bother with Sprint reviews? Just one example of an impediment from one of my recent projects. When I joined the project, the team was not able to run Sprint reviews as the development was done on an environment which was not able to run the entire code. The first reaction from people involved in the project was “Let’s skip the demonstration, it is wasting team’s time anyway. We should concentrate on coding instead!”.

Well, that is maybe the worst idea on an agile project – and it is extremely dangerous: As opposed to a waterfall approach where your point of reference is a fully fledged specification, the only chance to check if you are still on track is the Daily Scrum and the only way to check if you are still heading into the right direction is the Sprint review where you demonstrate  running software to the product owner at the end of each Sprint. In this situation, skipping the Sprint review is even worse than following a waterfall approach! Because is means you will lose one of your two reference points!

On the project I was talking about, we put the development of new features on hold for two Sprints and focused on fixing the development environment to solve the underlying issue.