The Sprint Retrospective

No matter how great you think your Agile team is, there is always, yes always, opportunity to improve. In order for an agile team to look for improvement opportunities, the team should set aside dedicated time at the each sprint to deliberately reflect on how they are doing and to find ways to improve. This is the reason for the sprint retrospective.

The sprint retrospective is usually the last thing done in a sprint. Many teams will have their retrospectives immediately after the sprint review. The entire team, including both the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should participate in the retrospective.

Although there are many ways to conduct a retrospective, perhaps the simplest and most effective way to conduct the retrospective is ask the team the following:

• What did we do well?
• What did not go as planned?
• What actions should we take to improve the process?

The Scrum Master can facilitate the retrospective meeting by asking everyone to just provide ideas during the scrum. Use either a digital whiteboard or a physical one, have each team member write down what the team did well, writing each idea on a separate note. Post the notes and group similar ideas together.

After having an initial list of ideas, the team can vote on specific idea to focus on during the next sprint. At the end of the sprint, the list of ideas is then revisited to see how well the team did.

The retrospective is one of the most valuable ceremonies when applying Agile and has tremendous power to inspire change for the team members involved. Unfortunately, a lot of Scrum Masters do not implement the retrospective or find it necessary. Whether you decide to conduct a retrospective or not, having some kind of meeting to keep your team excited and motivated for new challenges is a must.