Agile Retrospectives

The agile framework has one of the most important ceremony as "Retrospectives". Agile is based on empirical process. In this ceremony

“team do Inspect & Adapt. They look back at their ways of working, practices & continuously find ways to improve them”.

WHY we should do this Retrospective?

The agile manifesto & principles strongly recommends on Continuous improvement. To do this there should be regular cadence where team can come together & do Inspect & Adapt. Team reflects on how to become more effective & efficient. Teams use agile retrospectives meeting to do this inspect & adapt and find better ways of working. Retrospectives are at the core of any successful Agile Team environment.

Who should attend Retrospective?

As per Scrum Guide prescription all Scrum Team members are expected to attend. Team, Scrum Master (facilitator), and the Product Owner.

All members have to be present and need to contribute and help each Retrospective meeting meaningful & successful.

Where should Retrospective be held?

If Scrum Team member's are co-located then they can find a meeting room to have retro meeting. SM ideally should make sure that team has all necessary equipment like sticky notes, white boards, markers etc. to make session interesting and fun.

If team is not co-located then you can use several online tools like video conferencing, online retrospective boards, miro boards etc.

When should a Retrospective happen?

Retrospective is not optional meeting. As per Scrum Guide it has to happen “at the end of each Sprint”. And Sprint Retrospective is time-boxed.

The guidelines on time box:

1. If Sprint length is 1 month then limit for a Retrospective is 3 hours

2. If Sprint length is 2 weeks then limit for a Retrospective is 1.5 hours

The time-box concept will help to control irrelevant discussions, pin pointing, blame game, irrelevant discussions.

What is an Retrospective?

A retrospective is normally held at the end of each iteration, but teams can do it as often as needed. It focuses on the team & practices used to deliver software. The purpose of retrospectives is to brainstorm & help teams to improve their way of working.

Few things need to keep in mind

• All team members need to attend the retrospective meeting.

• Everyone should be actively contributing in the meeting.

• Team “inspect” how the iteration has gone & decide improvement action items and how they want to “Adapt” those for their way of working and behaviour going further.

• If team feels there is NO PROBLEM then it’s a BIG PROBLEM

• Before getting any new action items for the team check earlier action items and how much progress team has made on it.

Effective Retrospective

There are 3 basic principle to be followed for making retrospective meeting effective & efficient.

• Transparency

• Honesty

• Unbiased

High Level Basic Flow

Any effective retrospective meeting will ideally involve below mentioned steps:

1. Set Stage / Context

SM should facilitate the meeting well in advance so we can expect full attendance.

Send meeting invitation to all the required team members and stakeholders.

2. Gather Data

Before going to retrospective meeting, SM should gather last finished sprint related data and share with team. [** How to gather data - Read this post **]

In retrospective meeting, you can also gather more data from team like ideas, opinions, concerns that team members might have. This can be done through

various agile retrospective activities like Start, Stop, and Continue, Paint Me picture,

Lean coffee etc.

3. Generate Insights from Data

Once data is gathered then meaningful analytics have to be identified and patterns

have to be created. The idea is to identify trends and resolve them.

E.g. if the team members are unhappy about daily stand-ups then we have to figure

out what is causing this. It could be unrelated discussions, unrealistic time set up

that does not accommodate the number of updates, etc.

4. Draw Decisions / Actions

Once the underlying issues are identified (you can use various methods like 5 WHYs

for Root Cause Analysis), then draw improvement action items to resolve them.

Improvement action items can be assigned to entire team or to some individual also

who will be responsible to resolve it. You can also put due date if team agree.

5. Closure

Appreciate entire team for their efforts and for their participation. Make sure that the

meeting discussion & action points are documented and circulated to the team

members for easy reference.

Basic Team Rules

• Transparent

• Engaged

• Focused

• Participating

Purpose of Retrospective

• Analyse & Understand Did we achieve our Sprint goal?

• What did we Learn (What went good? what went wrong?)

• Continuous Improvement

• Its about process & not blame

Do's & Don'ts

Here’s what you need to know how to conductive effective retrospectives.

Various ways of conducting Retrospectives

Retrospectives is held at the end of each Sprint (and it is not an optional ceremony) where entire team collectively do INSPECT & ADAPT. We analyse how things went in last sprint in order to improve team performance in upcoming Sprint.

Teams normally discuss thing like:

- what’s working, what’s not

- what can be improved

- what can be added to the process

- what can be removed from the process

There are numerous ways & exercises for approaching these topics in retrospective meeting, but all face a similar challenge: keeping team engaging & focused for retrospectives. Unfortunately, no single approach is a silver bullet. We have to keep it interesting by trying various ways. Lets understand one simple way:

Start, Stop, Continue

One of the simplest and straightforward way of conducting Retrospective is the “Start, Stop & Continue”. Just create a visual board with “Start,” “Stop,” & “Continue” columns & provide team sticky notes to team. For each column, team will write their own observations about last Sprint as they relate to the following categories:

• Start: what actions we should Start taking

• Stop: what actions we should prevent or stop doing

• Continue: what actions are helping us and we should keep doing

Ask team to think and start writing down their thoughts on these three columns on sticky notes. Keep it time boxed for may be (10-15 min). When everyone is done ask them to categories their cards and paste it in appropriate columns. Then address each item one by one to allow people time to share their input. At the end of the discussion, set up a voting to decide which items are most important for us to improve. Ask everyone to vote and set number of items they can vote for (usually two). At end check which 2 item received maximum votes and keep those items as your area of focus (improvement action item) for the next Sprint.

*** There are many innovative ways of conducting retrospective. Stay tuned for upcoming post.

Disclaimer: Few images & reference are taken from internet.