The retrospective is the most important part of the sprint
I know, it’s a big statement, but I’ve got like 5 minutes worth of reading to prove it to you. Being able to fully maximize the retrospective potential is a superpower — the hammer to your Thor, the yellow sun to your Superman, the money and rough voice to your Batman — well, you get the idea.
Retro (or retrospective) is an agile ceremony that takes place at the end of every sprint, with one clear goal: to understand what went well in the sprint so we can preserve it, and understand what can be improved for the next sprint.
It means progress, if the same problems keep popping up sprint after sprint if the same pains come up again, if a bug that has happened before has happened again — you are doing it wrong.
Now, one might say that the retrospective is a waste of time, a boring ceremony meant to test our ability to stay awake during a meeting, well, one might be wrong, the retrospective ceremony is valuable, it’s magnificent — but only if you are doing it the right way.
A couple of months ago we had a re-org in our company, which led to a lot of (successful) attempts to improve our efficiency, and your loyal blogger here took it upon herself to make the retro cool again.
And since all of our R&D teams have adopted the template I created, I believe your team can benefit from it too.
In this post, I would like to share the process and best practices that I have collected after extensive research and those that I believe in.
When we sat down to redefine the retrospective process one thing was clear — if it’s not documented it never happened — meaning, the template of the retrospective is very important, and each step of it should be thought through.
Without further ado, let’s get to the steps of the superb retrospective.
The steps to rock your retro ceremony
- Sync on previously-created action items
- Review the sprint goals
- Examine the sprint metrics
- Glad, Sad, On the top of my head
- Creating the action items for the next sprint
Going over the previous sprint’s action items
In the words of Benjamin Franklin “Well done is way better than well said”.
Every quality retrospective produces quality action items because if we don’t actively improve, we don’t fulfill the potential and goals of the retro.
Start the retro by going over the action items that were created in the previous sprint, check which items were completed and what their impact was, which ones are still in the works and which haven’t started yet — and why?
Going over the existing action items at the beginning of the sprint allows us to start the retro with a feeling of action, involvement, and progress.
Review the sprint’s goals
An important part of every sprint is to determine the main goals that we want to achieve during the sprint, an important part of every retrospective is to examine whether we were able to achieve these goals and if not to understand why.
Lead a discussion about the goals — celebrate those we achieved and emphasize the value they added, discuss the goals we didn’t manage to achieve, and attempt to understand what prevented us from achieving them — what can we do about it? Is there an action item that can be created in order to help us?
Examine the sprint KPIs and metrics and compare them to the previous ones
The sprint metrics allow us to get a general view of the sprint.
An imperfect graph, one that does not look as planned, is an excellent starting point for understanding what needs improvement and what is holding us back from reaching the full potential of the sprint.
A graph is a great tool for identifying patterns and anomalies in the sprint:
- Is our task estimation too high? Is it too low?
- Do we allow unplanned items to be inserted in the middle of the sprint? if so, were they really urgent? Who were they urgent to?
- Are we logging our work time properly? does the graph really reflect the work and effort the team puts in?
- Compare the metrics of the current sprint with those of the previous sprint, have we improved? have we gone backward? — why? do we keep making the same mistakes?
- Do we have bugs that didn’t meet ZBP?
Glad, Sad, Off the top of my head
This is a technique in which the thoughts and opinions of the team about the last sprint and the tasks that were in it are categorized into emotions.
The focus on human emotions creates honest and meaningful feedback from the entire team members which leads to active change and involvement to ensure the next sprint will be better than the previous one.
During the retro, go through the comments and check — which ones can become action items.
- on the top of my head — is there a new idea we can implement?
- sad — how can we prevent this feeling next time?
- glad — was there some good actions taken or feature added or technique learned that we want to share with the rest of the team/group/company?
Make sure the team writes down their insights throughout the sprint, when the feelings are still fresh and the mind is set on the current thought only.
Creating the action items for the next sprint
This step is not a part of the chronological order of the retrospective but is relevant to all steps.
The purpose of the retrospective is to make sure that we improve from sprint to sprint and so do our work and our processes.
To accomplish these goals — at each stage of the retro ask yourself, is there anything we can do to improve the next sprint? To make our work more efficient? To prevent the obstacle we encountered from happening again?
Bugs, for example, are an excellent opportunity to create action items, what can we do to make sure that the bug we handled will not happen again? What could we have done to prevent it in the first place? What can be done to make it easier to investigate and identify it when it happens?
The most important rule for action items is that quality is more important than quantity, not every action item is significant, some are more important than others, and it is better to produce a few significant action items than a lot of small ones with little effect.
One should add the action item to the company task management tool, so they will be given the importance they deserve and will not be forgotten.
Final words
It is important to think carefully about what aspects we want to improve and how we document them in a way that makes it clear to us whether we are learning from our work and experience — whether we are making a progress or retreating.
The retrospective is your way to make sure your team is always improving, and that the sprints are constantly reaching their full potential.
It’s time to use your new superpowers - ready? set, retro!
