What is a retrospective?
A retrospective is a meeting in which a team examines how they work together in order to improve their future collaborations.
Agile teams conduct retrospectives at the end of sprints, during which teams complete a set amount of work.
Retrospectives give teams feedback on what went well and especially what didn't go well with the goal of doing better in the next sprint.
Why retrospectives are a crucial tool for teams
Teams can say what they think
A retrospective meeting invites all team members to share their ideas. What went well in the last sprint? What could have gone better? How can we act on this information?
The retrospective gives everyone a chance to express their opinion (not just the more extroverted team members).
Challenges are addressed
We all know the sentiment: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Take a step back to assess how you are achieving the results. There are probably friction points and tensions that we are not aware of. They come to the surface during project retrospectives. It's not just a venting session - it's an opportunity to address these challenges and work together more effectively.
Collaboration improves
Processes and results improve over time. There are always ways to do things differently and better... and to adapt to external factors.
Questions to ask and solve during the retrospective
The Scrum Master leads the way! He should ask a few questions to get the discussion going:
1. What went well?
Start with the positive and ask to describe all the things the team was happy with during the sprint. Did they fix more bugs than they thought? Did they solve a difficult problem? Worked around an obstacle?
These are things we will continue to do.
2. What didn't go well?
This question is not as fun to answer, but it can be instructive. It's important to share frustrations and challenges from the last sprint, and in a constructive and respectful way, of course.
These are things we will stop doing.
3. What ideas do we have for the next time?
A retrospective is about continuous improvement. This question helps us determine how to apply what we've learned to the next sprints, so that everything goes even better.
These are things we will continue to do.
4. How will we implement these actions?
We gather a lot of information through these questions. To be useful, we need to put it into practice. That is the purpose of this question. It requires us to identify what we will actually do with the elements we have discovered.
These are our actions.
