“Agile retrospectives are a great way to continuously improve the way of working.” – Ben Linders
As members of Scrum teams, it is essential to consistently assess aspects that can be improved to foster continuous improvement. Scrum Retrospectives provide a valuable opportunity to review, adapt, and refine our working processes. This article offers tips to help make your Retrospectives as productive as possible.
According to the Scrum Guide, 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.
The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to:
Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools;
Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and,
Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.
The event should always take place after the Sprint Review and before the next Sprint Planning. This sequence is important because if you haven’t assessed the increment and how you are collaborating with stakeholders, you haven’t fully evaluated the sprint. Failing to do so can result in changes that may not be suitable for your situation.
As far as duration is concerned, the Scrum Guide states that the time box for a Sprint Retrospective is a maximum of three hours for a one-month Sprint. Adjust that time box accordingly based on your sprint length.
As a Scrum Master, you should ask the following questions more often than not, as these often become the basis of the Sprint Retrospective discussions.
- Is our increment quality getting better?
- Do we feel like a team?
- Are we living the Scrum values?
- What’s slowing us down as a team?
- How are our relationships with people outside the Scrum team?
- Do we need to review the definition of done?
Ways to effectively facilitate Sprint Retrospective:
1. Preparation for the Sprint Retrospective:
- Keep a fixed time slot for the Sprint Retrospective meetings. Send an invite 3 days in advance to all the Scrum team members. As a matter of course, we don’t expect external stakeholders to be part of retrospective meetings.
- You may prefer to choose a theme for the Retrospective in advance. Ensure you select different themes to prevent Retrospectives from becoming boring and monotonous. We can pick from the following themes:
- Working, Not working, Puzzling
- Start, Stop, Continue
- Good, Problematic, Significant
- What went well, what went wrong, what needs to change
- Mad, Sad, Glad
- Liked, Learnt, Locked, Longed-for
- It’s wise to collect data in advance for the upcoming retrospective meeting, as it gives the Scrum Master some time to plan for the actual meeting by focusing on relevant details only. The following metrics can be handy during a Retrospective meeting:
- Team Morale/Happiness Index – In my team, we conduct a team happiness survey after every Sprint Review meeting.
- Team Velocity is a measure of the amount of work a Scrum team can complete during a single sprint. Velocity is most useful when tracked over multiple sprints. This allows the team to identify trends and, thus, can be a helpful metric during Sprint Retrospective.
- Cumulative flow diagram – to track the progress of a Scrum team during a specific period. CFDs enable teams to visualise their workflow, identify bottlenecks, track progress, and enhance process efficiency.
If we have these metrics handy, Retrospectives can be productive.
- It is wise to send another reminder to the team members just to make sure no one misses the meeting and come prepared. You may wish to send the links of the Sprint metrics and team working agreement along with the invitation.
2. Actual Meeting:
When it comes to the actual meeting, a friendly environment is very important. Since Sprint Retrospectives are an opportunity to inspect and adapt hence, the involvement of every team member is prime important. A facilitator can take care of the following points while running a Sprint Retrospective meeting:
- Icebreaker (new teams): To make everyone feel comfortable, we typically begin the proceedings with a game, poll, or quiz. If the team is relatively new, I would recommend this technique to everyone, as it is essential that everyone feels safe and ready to voice their opinion. There can be instances when team members feel intimidated, especially in the presence of a Product Owner.
- Set the context: Once you gauge the weather and mood of the team members, it’s time to come to the point. Retrospectives should focus only on the previous sprint. It is primarily focused on what we can learn and improve from the last two weeks. It should focus on people, processes and technology in general.
- Begin with Previous Retrospective Action Items: If you’re not reviewing past action items, then you’re not monitoring the progress of the improvements brought forth in previous Sprint Retrospectives. Look for the previous Retrospective actions prioritised and picked up in the last sprint, and set aside five minutes to review old Retrospective actions.
- Discussion on the current Sprint: With data and metrics already extracted, a facilitator can initiate the discussion based on the chosen theme for the Retrospective. To facilitate a healthy discussion, keep the following points in mind:
- There should be a balance among various categories (ex., stop doing, start doing and continue doing) of the theme, and it shouldn’t be skewed in favour of one. If all team members are voicing their opinions on a particular category, the Scrum Master should intervene and provide direction for the overall discussion.
- Make sure everyone participates.
- Keep track of time. If you find that your team tends to linger on a particular issue, preventing you from covering all the topics you want to discuss in the Retrospective, consider time-boxing the discussion.
- Utilise techniques such as 5 Whys and Fishbone diagrams to identify the root cause of a specific problem.
- Ensure there is no blame game among team members.
- In today’s virtual remote work scenario, we can make use of online tools. Poor tooling negatively impacts the participant experience. For instance, we use a tool called ‘PointingPoker’ for our retrospective meetings, and the team loves it. It provides the team with a user-friendly interface that offers the option to remain anonymous. We can also export the final data/actions from the tool to the team Confluence space.
- We can also utilise the Sprint Retrospective templates available with other applications, such as Confluence, Miro, and Mural.
- Voting – After enough ideas have been generated and discussed, have team members vote for the most important item(s). One can also select the top idea from each category. Tools like PointingPoker, Mentimeter, or Retro.io provide features that allow team members to vote online.
- Outcomes/actions – The Scrum Master must ensure that all top-voted actions and improvement items are documented, and action points are assigned to an accountable person(s) who will be responsible for resolving them by the agreed-upon due date.
Actions should be:
Small but SMART
Clear and understandable
Formulated so that the benefit is clear
- Closing – The goal of this final phase is to summarise the results of our Retrospective and leave a positive impression on the meeting participants. One may close the Retrospective with an appreciation for the hard work everyone did both during the iteration and the retrospective.
3. Post the Retrospective:
Once the meeting is over, it’s not all done. There are still steps/actions that the Scrum Master needs to be aware of. Let’s have a look at them one by one:
- Documentation – It’s wise to keep a record of what was discussed during the Retrospective meeting. Before COVID-19, we would take a picture of the team board (with sticky notes) and store it safely in the team’s Confluence space for future reference. These days, with a virtual work environment, one can utilise online tools such as Mural, Miro, Retrospected, PointingPoker, and Fun Retro, which offer a similar look and feel.
- Product Backlog update – Create a JIRA issue with an issue type “Retro” so that it can be identified as a retrospective action or The story. The newly created story should be identifiable among other product backlog items. The Scrum Guide states that we should make every effort to select at least one Retrospective story or an improvement item for the forthcoming Sprint.
- Follow-up – Once the Retro story is picked up in the coming sprint, the assignee must give an update during the daily stand-up on the progress of the same.
Conclusion
Conducting a Sprint Retrospective meeting is one of the most valuable processes in Agile methodology and has significant potential to inspire change among team members. While learning how to facilitate a Sprint Retrospective can be challenging, mastering it is relatively straightforward. When done correctly, facilitation becomes an art, and these retrospectives can transform into enjoyable exercises that the team looks forward to at the end of each sprint.
Could you try some of the suggested strategies? Have you been able to measure the effectiveness of your team’s Retrospectives? What challenges did you face?
Happy Scrumming, Keep Improving :)
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