Retrospective

Improve & Learn, with regards to people, relationships, process and tools.

  • Concrete actions
  • Speak up!
  • (Be open and honest, accept feedback, and have respect.)

Why

The goal of the retrospective[1] is to further improve the way of working at every sprint, with regards to people, relationships, process and tools.

Prepare for success

How

  • In order to generate insights as a team in possible improvements to your way of working, all team members need to actively participate in the retrospective, with an open and honest stance. Since a retrospective usually requires a different atmosphere than the sprint review that just finished, a short exercise to focus on this setting is advised. Letting all team member speak during this exercise will increase their participation.
  • Although compliments can be a useful tool during the Retrospective, it is certainly not enough. Only when team member can also have a critical eye towards each other and their way of working, a culture of continuous improvement will grow.
  • The Scrum Master should vary the format for the retrospective every now and then, in order to prevent it from becoming a boring routine. Also for specific situations that the team or project is facing, specific formats could be used. A great source for inspiration for this, that is used frequently by Scrum Masters at Kabisa, is Retromat.
  • Based on what happened during the sprint, and hearing the thoughts about this from every team member, the team should discuss and plan concrete improvement actions that they will take as a team during the next sprint. Keep it realistic.

Definition of Done[2]

  • Agreement on one or more concrete improvement actions (or experiments) that the team will execute during the next sprint.
  • The improvement actions are defined as chores on the Sprint Backlog.

Real Life Example

The Scrum Master discovered a shared appreciation for the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the team for the custom development of a new webshop for consumer products. At the end of the second sprint, he had prepared a Retrospective format based on the Lord of the Rings. One of the analogies used in that format, was the quest that the project/team was on. During the conversation that followed, the team agreed that they would need to have more focus on integration of the frontend, the CMS, and the backend. As a result, at the end of the third sprint, all frontend configuration and content was really managed by the CMS, and provided by the backend.

Notes

  1. Retrospective - Sprint ceremony about improving the process
  2. Definition of Done - A shared understanding of expectations that the Increment must live up to in order to be releasable into production. Managed by the Development Team.