Scrum Ceremony: Retrospective

In relation to working you will hear the word retrospective a lot. During my agile coaching I got asked a lot how a good retrospective meeting should look like, what do you do? What will work? Let’s dive a bit deeper into the retrospective.

The Sprint Retrospective is organised and ran after the Sprint Review and prior to the next Sprint Planning. This is a time boxed (Best – Practise; at most a three-hour) meeting for one-month Sprints. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter. The scrum master ensures that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose. This is the opportunity for the Scrum Team to improve and all members should be attending the meetng.

During the Sprint Retrospective, the team discusses:

  • What went well in the Sprint

  • What could be improved

  • What will we commit to improve in the next Sprint

What I like to do in my retrospective meetings as well, is to ask the members to mark the previous sprint between 1 and 10. To prevent people to simply give the same mark as their neighbour, I simply ask them to write their mark down and then show it all at once. We will calculate an average for the marks and that average is stored in the project documentation. These averages will show the health trend of your project. Are the members positive, the trend goes up, are the members negative the trend goes down.

The Scrum Master encourages the team to improve its sprint and project delivery process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint. During each Sprint Retrospective, the team plans ways to increase product quality by improving work processes or adapting the definition of “Done” if appropriate and not in conflict with product or organisational standards.

By the end of the Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team should have identified improvements that it will implement in the next Sprint. Implementing these improvements in the next Sprint is the adaptation to the inspection of the Scrum Team itself. Although improvements may be implemented at any time, the Sprint Retrospective provides a formal opportunity to focus on inspection and adaptation.

It is the agile software development teams, which made retrospective meetings popular, but retrospectives are a great tool for all teams and are part of the “formal” Agile or Scrum ceremonies

Here's how I like to run basic retrospectives, and how you could adapt them to suit your team.  The first very important rule is to provide a safe space for the team to reflect on and discuss what works well (and what doesn't!) so you can improve.

 Retrospective Preparation

Book a meeting room for at least an hour (up to three hours): 15 minutes to set up, 30 minutes for the session, and 15 minutes to take photos and clean up.

Come 15 minutes ahead of the rest of the team, and bring

  • Whiteboard

  • Markers

  • Sticky notes

  • Timer

Draw the headings "What did we do well?" and "What should have we done better?" up on the whiteboard. Use the Retrospective blueprint to create a new Retrospective page in your project space, and use that to record the outputs of your session.

STEP 1. Set the stage

The Scrum master welcomes everyone to the retrospective meeting and (re-) establish the rules of engagement:

  • Embrace a positive spirit of continuous improvement and share whatever you think will help the team improve.

  • Don't make it personal, don't take it personally.

  • Listen with an open mind, and remember that everyone's experience is valid (even those you don't share).

  • Set the boundary of your discussion. Some examples; is it that last sprint we are reflecting on? The last quarter only? Everything since the project started? Be clear how far back you're willing to go.

  • Encourage the team to embrace an improvement mind-set, away from blame.

  • This is the point where I add the marking of the sprint. Ask all team members to give a mark between 1 and 10 and record the team’s average. In the discussions later you will evaluate why the marks are given as they are.

Tip: What I have found particularly helpful in my agile teams is to let someone other than the team lead (scrum master) facilitate. Sharing the facilitation around the team will keep your retrospectives fresh, encourage greater participation, and uncover more inconvenient truths.

STEP 2. What went Well

Start the session on a positive note. Have each team member use green sticky notes to write down what they feel went well (one idea per sticky). As people post their sticky notes on the whiteboard, the facilitator should group similar or duplicate ideas together.

Discuss your ideas briefly as a team.

PITFALL !!

During the discussion, you might find that the discussions are dominated by one or two people. This is a sign you may need a stronger facilitator. Find an opportunity as the scrum master to step in as a scrum master and ask what one of your quieter team members has to say on the topic.

STEP 3 What needs improvement

Same structure as above, but using pink or red sticky notes. Remind your team that this is about actions and outcomes – not about specific people.

STEP 4 Next Steps

Having identified what didn't go so well, what concrete actions can the team take to improve those things? Have your team use blue sticky notes to place ideas on the board. Group them and then discuss as a team, agree to which actions you will take, assign owners and a due date to get them DONE.

Here is also where you revisit every persons individual mark and ask them to explain, why the mark is given as it is. As a last but very important step, thank everyone for their involvement and their honesty. Quickly run through the list of follow-up items, their owners and due dates.

PITFALL!!

You might end up in a situation where your ideas aren't leading to improvements. 

Don't let this be a ritual with no real value. Do a retro on your retro! Make sure ideas are turned into tasks, and that those tasks are incorporated into your sprints. Don't just assume people can just squeeze them in at the edges.

The steps above are for a brief basic minute retrospective meeting. Depending on the scope and complexity of your work, team size, and/or length of time since the last retrospective, you may need to expand this up to an hour, or possibly even two hours. Scale each section of the basic workshop as you see fit.

Alternatively, here are some variations and extra elements to try.

MAP OUT THE PAST TWO MONTHS

On the whiteboard, draw a timeline spanning the past two months. Then have the team members call out significant events: iteration/sprint starts, releases, victories, discoveries, or anything else that had an impact on your work.

Do this activity at the start of the meeting, but after the scoring of the sprint. Not only is this a great way to foster a shared sense of achievement and solidarity, it helps refresh everyone's memory and sets the stage for the rest of the retrospective.

THE 4 QUESTION MODEL

Replace the "what worked well" and "what didn't work well" activities with a four-part format for some additional depth:

  • What did you like?

  • What was lacking?

  • What did you learn?

  • What do you long for going forward?

This variation works best in longer (45 - 60 min) retrospectives where you can devote five minutes or more to each question.

TESTIFY

If time allows (and team members are willing), have each participant speak about the sticky notes they put up during the "What worked well", "What didn't work well", and "Next steps" activities. This helps to ensure all team members contribute evenly (even the quieter team members) and promotes an even deeper discussion.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Take a few minutes to let team members acknowledge each other's accomplishments since the last retrospective and/or express thanks for having received help from a teammate. Keep it brief, and keep it genuine. At some there might be a flood of acknowledgements, while at others there might be very few. Just roll with the ebb and flow – don't force it.

This should be a strictly peer-to-peer exercise, with only team members at the individual contributor level allowed to participate. Managers, scrum masters, etc. are asked to keep quiet.

DOT VOTING

If loads of ideas emerge during the "Next steps" activity, vote on which action items you'll prioritize in the immediate term. Everyone grabs a marker and places dots on the three ideas they'd like to see at the top of the list (no more than one dot per idea, please!). Tally up the dots, discuss the results with your team, and select owners for the top-voted items.

Note that you can also do this immediately after the "What didn't work well" activity to identify the team's top three areas for improvement. This helps guide the "Next steps" activity and keep it focused on those three areas.

Following these steps and add additional components, where fit and suitable, will provide you with a great structure to reflect on you sprints and improve the quality of the team process going forward. You have mastered the Retrospective!