… and here we are; the last scrum event in the Sprint. So what is it about?
“The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.” – Scrum Guide
Seems to be easy and straightforward but the whole meeting could go wrong:
- it is easy to lose the focus and turn the meeting into a complaining session
- dominators can take over the meeting
- not much value generated; no real action will be taken after the meeting
- miss tracking of the on-going retro actions
It has been decided to cut this meeting into two sections; first is about analyzing the current Sprint (in regards to people, relationships, process, and tools) and identifying or proposing potential improvements, the second is about discussing and creating a plan for the potential improvements.
I will talk about distributed teams in the upcoming posts; for now, let’s assume we have one local team. The team prepares some notes for the meeting to speed up the process. They group them into four categories: what was good, what can be improved, ideas and beer (can be given to anyone who did something extraordinary). If the note belongs either to the improvement or to the ideas category a proposal has to be created in order to guide the conversation about the potential improvement. Everyone has the same amount of time; 2-5 minutes to present his or her note.
Once the first section has been completed after a tiny break the team comes together again. Each note from the improvement and the ideas category will be grouped and each group gets discussed by the team. During the discussion, the team will create actions and assign an owner to it who can ensure that the necessary action will be taken.
The whole meeting shouldn’t take longer then three-hour for one-month Sprints.
The end of the Sprint cycle has been reached, as soon as the retro ends a new Sprint will be started and this is how it goes round and round.