Mastering Empirical Process Control — Sprint Retrospective
The Sprint Retrospective is one of the most important events in the Scrum framework, and one which enables empiricism in the Scrum framework.
“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Empiricism in a nutshell
Scrum is founded on empirical process control theory, or empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. Three pillars uphold every implementation of empirical process control: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
- The Scrum Guide
Let me guide you through how these 3 pillars are critical to each Scrum event, and how they can help guide you through the unknowns.
You can sum up the empiricism into:
- Have access to knowledge and a shared understanding (transparency)
- Trying something out based on that knowledge and view the outcome (inspection)
- Based on the results — which is new knowledge — try something else (adaptation).
