Agile Methodologies: Sustainable Improvement Based on Retrospective

In recent years, we have begun to hear some concepts that we cannot ignore. They’re so strong and inevitable. If you have a corporate experience, you may have witnessed companies’ efforts to adopt this culture. If you still have not, we can guarantee that you will be. Because as the world changes, our working styles, methods, and understanding also change. It is crucial for all of us to use our time effectively, therefore we must ensure compatibility with agile ways of working.

Today is very important, and tomorrow is much more important. To shape your day, to shape your future, past data will be helpful and show what you must do in order to get efficiency. You will ask few questions to yourself: “What worked and what didn’t work?” Be honest to yourself because this is the first step of this methodology, the significant building block of this understanding. It is time to commemorate “retrospective”, the protagonist of this article.

Retrospectives are the major component of building high performing teams and study groups. What do I mean by retrospective? First, let’s define the term itself, then try to implement it to our life as an agile principle. In short, it is considered as an overview of past work. Every field has its own retrospective, for instance some medical and psychological researches are longitudinal studies and they are known as retrospective/historic cohort study. As I summarized, this is based on experiences. Improving each passing day by using retrospective as a continuous development tool.

We believe that the challenge for a team of people working together is the regularly improve how they solve the problem, as problem solving is more effective when there is a focus on sustainable improvement. There are bunch of ways to do that because agile culture consists so many solutions, but today we’ll deal with historic data.

As a reader, you can think retrospectives as planned sessions that focuses on what did or did not go well, and what can be done to improve the next sprint. It may sound unusual because this is a different concept to the customary project view. However, once you try it, you will love it. Wondering why?

Why retrospectives?

• Improve efficiency
• Can be adapted differently for each team
• Improves our work
• It minimizes any problems in the next projects.
• Improve quality

Briefly, the idea of getting the team together, client included, to discuss what worked and didn’t work, could be hazardous. However, one of the challenges of agile culture is transparency and being open to receive and provide any kind of feedback. Because, you can be sure that, what determines the performance of your team is how open you are to each other.

By Debi Çakar