Scrum: Sprint Retrospective
The Sprint Retrospective
- What: An opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint. During each Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team plans ways to increase product quality by improving work processes or adapting the definition of “Done”, and also ways to increase velocity by removing bottlenecks and impediments to the flow of work.
- Who: Scrum Team (No Managers).
- When: After the Sprint Review and prior to the next Sprint Planning session. Approx. 1.5 hours per 2-week sprint.
Agenda
- Inspect: Review how the last Sprint went with regards to sprint goals, people, relationships, process, and tools;
- Review impact of improvements adopted at last retrospective.
- Identify and order (use grouping and ‘dot voting’) the major items that went well. Identify and order the major things that need improving.
- Identify root causes of all major problems impacting the performance of the team (use tools like Five Why’s and Fishbone Diagrams).
- Adapt: Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work. Commit to at least one improvement and add it to the backlog for the next sprint.
Outcomes
- Root causes determined for issues that prevented team from meeting objectives or slowed down their work
- A set of improvements or corrective actions that the team will implement in the next Sprint. (Implementing these improvements in the next Sprint is the adaptation to the inspection of the Scrum Team itself).
SAFe Considerations
As part of an Agile Release Train (ART), each team contributes to the creation of a new program increment from each iteration, in line with the high-level program plan produced at the PI Planning event. The PI Plan includes both a time-line for feature delivery from each team and also a set of PI Objectives. Teams may wish to evaluate how well they tracked to this original plan and what ART-level impediments hindered their progress. Potential retrospective actions may include improvements to things like the planning process, ART structure or Program-level agile ceremonies.
Other Considerations
The Scrum Master facilitates this meeting. There are many web-based tools available to support the process, such as IdeaBoardz, or RetroRabbit, these are great for distributed teams, and also provide anonymity where desired. Inspection and adaptation is the core of the scrum framework. Mastering and getting comfortable with this practice is essential for teams to learn and grow.
For more on retrospectives, see here.
