Sprint Retrospective Meeting - Facts & Rules

Source:  Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber

Duration:

1.     Time-boxed to 03 Hours (Three Hrs).

2.     Occurs after Sprint Review & Before Next Sprint Planning meeting.

  

Attendees:

3.     Team, Scrum Master, and Product Owner.

4.     The Product Owner is optional

 Retrospective Procedure

5.     All Team members answer two questions:

a.     What went well during the last Sprint?

b.     What could be improved in the next Sprint?

6.     Also team members can think on four Short Subjects:

a.     Start Doing

b.     Stop Doing

c.     Do More

d.     Do Less

7.     The Scrum Master writes down the Team’s answers in summary form.

8.     Scrum Master does not provide answers, but facilitate the Team’s search for better ways for the Scrum process to work for it.

Action Items – At The End

9.     The Team prioritizes in which order it wants to talk about the potential improvements.

10.   Actionable items that can be added to the next Sprint should be devised as high-priority non-functional Product Backlog.

More Details On Retrospective

11.   Type of Retrospectives

a.     Iteration Retrospective

b.     Release Retrospective

c.     Project Retrospective

d.     Surprise Retrospective

12.   Retrospectives Improvements: Retrospective offers multiple improvements.

a.     Improved Productivity

b.     Improved Capability

c.     Improved Quality

d.     Improved Capacity

13.   Steps to Conduct Retrospectives

a.     Set the Stage

In this step, aim at creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortable speaking about things that may not have gone well on the project.

Few techniques:

·         Check-In – Ask everyone to summarize in one-two words what they hope to get from retrospectives.

·         Focus On/Focus Off

·         ESVP - Explorers, Shoppers, Vacationers, Prisoners

·         Working Agreements

b.     Gather Data

Create a shared picture of what happened during the iteration.

Few techniques:

·         Timeline

·         Triple Nickels – Top Five Ideas, Elaborated By Five Groups, Five Times

·         Mad, Sad, Glad

·         Local Strength

·         Satisfaction Histograms

·         Team Radar

·         Like to Like

c.     Generate Insights

This step involves driving meaning insights from the gathered data in previous step and make sense out of it.

Activities done in this step help team interpret and understand implications of the issues before then move on to solving them.

Few techniques:

·         Brainstorming

·         Five Whys

·         Fishbone

·         Prioritize with Dots

·         Identify Themes

d.     Decide What To do

                        In this step, team will decide what they will change and how they will behave differently.

Few techniques:

·         Short Subjects –

1.     What Went Well,

2.     Do differently Next time

3.     Keep, Drop, Add

4.    Start Doing, Stop Doing, Do More, Do Less

·         SMART Goals

·         Retrospective Planning Games

·         Circle Of Questions

e.     Close Retrospective

                        Here team summarizes:

·         What the team decided to keep

·         What to change

·         What we are thankful for

·         Where we can use our time going forward

·         Express Appreciation to each other

Few techniques:

·         Plus/Delta

·         Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis

·         ROTI (Return on Time Invested)

·         Appreciations

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Regards,

Arun Manglick