Improving Your Retrospective Part 3: Techniques

Retrospectives are the most important event in the Scrum. Use these new retrospective techniques and tools to engage your team and maximize the benefits.

In several previous posts I wrote about the retrospective which is a key event and perhaps the most important in the Scrum Framework. We explored how the retrospective doesn’t need to be fast, how to improve retrospectives, and how to set the stage for a successful retro.

I also compared the agile retrospective to the traditional project post-mortem review, and talked about removing fear and blame from the retrospective process. In this post we will look at some specific techniques that can be used for the stages of gathering data, generating insights and deciding what to do. Good Scrum Masters will vary their techniques with every retrospective so that they are able to help the team generate insights.

5 Stages for an Effective Retrospective

You may recall the 5 stages or phases of the retrospective that were proposed by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen in their excellent book, Agile Retrospectives:

1. Set the Stage