Why do retrospectives

Collaboration : the collaboration is omnipresent and respectful. It manifests itself in constant and high-quality communication. Resources : we have access to all the material resources and support we need to accomplish our mission. Learning : team members keep developing their skills through repeated learnings, cycle after cycle. We generally observe a retrospective at the end of each Sprint for a Scrum team, once every two weeks on average.

Thus, the group quickly reassesses the impact of the action items it took on in the last retrospective. Retrospectives are not meant to be meetings that go on forever. Again with the example of a retro every two weeks , expect a minute session. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter. In short, there is no particular constraint apart from favoring relatively short meetings and making retrospectives frequent. To do this, the team builds an action plan during the retrospective, consisting of one or more action items.

There are endless examples of action elements as there can be so many topics covered in a retrospective. Don't commit to too many action items at once. Remember that the point of an action plan is to see a rapid and distinct improvement in the team by the next cycle.

Avoid assigning an action item to more than one person at the same time. This would probably dilute the notion of accountability within the team. While multiple people can work together to accomplish an action item, we recommend that you only name one person responsible for it - as a messenger role towards the action item's progression. For the sake of brevity and efficiency, let's focus on examples of virtual retrospective activities - which can, however, easily be conducted in the office as well.

This format is one of the easiest to understand and use when starting out with the practice of Agile retrospectives. Known for its great simplicity, the 4Ls has quickly become a classic retrospective format.

We recommend using this activity to highlight both the positive and negative aspects of a project or an iteration. Note that many Scrum Masters select this facilitation technique for recurring retrospectives as well. Combine the Team spirit responses with the comments from Ideas to determine which actions your team members want to take.

Designed to invite team members to express themselves on a given set of themes, the Team Radar visually represents the team's strengths and weaknesses. Remember the list of the 10 team dimensions mentioned above? You could use them on your radar to deliver a real-time snapshot of your team's health.

Email address. Not Registered? If you don't already have a Scrum. Register Here. What is a Sprint Retrospective? Learn About the Sprint Retrospective Event As described in the Scrum Guide , the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness. Most of the time though, you will want to end with concrete action items i.

Small things that the team will do to see if it helps with one of their problems. You have to try it out. If it turns out to be an improvement you keep it and build on it.

Warning: Implementing action items takes time. If you do retrospectives but nobody ever has time to follow up on the action items people will quickly grow disillusioned. BTW, Scrum recognizes that and prescribes that the most important action item from the retro is automatically part of the next Sprint Backlog. Agile development teams have made retrospective meetings quite popular.

Regardless of how good a Scrum team is, there is always some room for improvement. Since the focus of agile development is continuous improvement, a good project team sets aside a brief period at the end of each Sprint to reflect how they are doing and seeks out new ways to improve.

This is called a Sprint Retrospective. The term retrospective implies looking back or dealing with past events and situations. Well, if you do not know what a Sprint is, a Sprint essentially is a time-boxed period during which a set amount of work is to be completed by the Scrum team. It is at the very heart of Scrum and agile methodologies.

The purpose of a Sprint Retrospective is to identify potential pitfalls and mistakes, evaluate the past working cycle and define actions that may improve things. A Sprint Retrospective is like a safe space for people to share honest feedback. It is an opportunity to focus on inspection and adaptation. Sprint retrospective plays a fundamental role in the scrum framework in agile development. During the sprint retrospective, a team discusses, what went well in the Sprint, what all can be improved and what actions shall be undertaken to improve the next Sprint.

Everything that has an effect on how the Scrum team builds a product such as the practices, processes, tools and communication are open to survey and the retrospective is attended by the product owner, scrum master, development team, and optionally the stakeholders.

Based on the discussions in a retrospective, the team members execute changes and then proceed to the coming sprint with an incrementally improved process.

The best thing about a retrospective is that it happens at the very last when the sprint ends. This way fresh ideas are churned out and teased out by the whole team in the next Sprint.

Afterall, the real purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to bring about a positive change in the project, team, and organization. The review is to evaluate how they could have defended better. While a sprint retrospective is essentially an optimised process for teams working in an agile environment, it can be optimised for any type of team that works on a shared project. More often than not, crucial ceremonies in agile such as the retrospective appear very mundane to project teams and as a result they do not use it to their full advantage.