Time for a Demo?

When I first learned Scrum, the idea was to have 30-day (4 week) iterations with a demo at the end of each iteration. Today I see teams that have iterations from 1 to 4 weeks, or in the case of Kanban, no iterations at all. So the question is, how often should there be a demo?

I’m a believer of getting sign off on a user story once it's done. This usually comes from the person who wrote it, who may be a proxy to the product owner. So when we get to the end of the iteration, all the stories that are completed have already been reviewed by someone on the business side but not necessarily the product owner. 

So the questions is, If it’s a short iteration, does it make sense to have a more formal demo of the stories? I think in some cases the answer is “no.” 

On one of my projects where we were using Kanban, we planned the demos every 4 weeks. This allowed us to finish a set of stories that were part of a feature, so the demo was more complete. I think this approach works with short iterations as well, only conducting the demo after every second or third iteration, depending on how long your iterations are and how complex your features are. 

There's also another consideration. I work with clients building applications that will get rolled out to the organization. On these projects, we need to consider organizational change management. The demos serve as a way to help introduce the new application to the end users. So from this perspective, there may be a large number of attendees at the demos. This is another argument for less frequent demos.

So while a demo can be held at the end of every iteration, even for short iterations, there are some reasons to hold them less frequently.