GETTING STARTED WITH PRODUCT DELIVERY

The Sprint Retrospective (Part 10 of 10)

So in Retrospect… in 2015 not a single person got the right answer to “where do you see yourself 5 years from now?”

Vincent Carter

Published in

Straight Scrum

6 min readSep 21, 2021

The Sprint Retrospective is one of the most important things you can be doing every Sprint to ensure that your Scrum Team remains on the path of Continuous Improvement. I’ve taken several polls in my workshops asking participants how often their teams run the various Scrum events and by far the one event that gets skipped or canceled the most is the Sprint Retrospective. For those participants that do run a Retrospective every Sprint, a large percentage of the events are scheduled for only 15 minutes. Don’t forget, we’re not talking about the Daily Scrum, we’re talking about the Sprint Retrospective. The best you can hope to get out of a 15-minute Retrospective is something like, “The team should do better at communication.” and afterward nothing is really done to improve communication because a statement like that is too vague to be actionable. If you and your organization are serious about Continuous Improvement for your Scrum Teams, then you need to take the Sprint Retrospective seriously by not skipping it and by not reducing it to a quick 15-minute session where nothing of substance is discussed.

What is the Sprint Retrospective?

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. During the Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team inspects how the last Sprint went with regards to “individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and their Definition of Done.” If this sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because the Scrum Guide takes most of this previous sentence directly from the first value in the Agile Manifesto, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” If you haven’t read the Agile Manifesto in a while, or ever, after you finish reading this article, go read it. The Sprint Retrospective is the last event in a Sprint and for a month-long Sprint, the maximum time-box is 3 hours. At the end of the Retrospective, you are not required to add any of the proposed improvements to the Sprint Backlog but it is a good practice. By doing so, the Scrum Team’s journey for Continuous Improvement is protected from being deprioritized and it brings visibility to the improvement by being part of the Daily Scrum’s discussion.

Why do Teams Cancel Sprint Retrospectives?

Many times the “Scrumbut” has raised its nasty head about Retrospectives and murmured the following words, “We use Scrum, but Retrospectives are a waste of time, so we don’t do them.” In Game of Thrones, Benjen Stark says “…Nothing someone says before the word ‘but’ really counts.” Because there are a large number of teams that say they are doing Scrum “but” they do not run Retrospectives every Sprint, it’s worth exploring some of the reasons they give.

“Everything is going great, so we don’t need Retrospectives”
If this is the reason that a team is giving, then they are clearly missing the point that Retrospectives are not just about what is not going well. It’s also the time to talk about what is going well. The Scrum Team can identify several helpful changes to improve its effectiveness by simply discussing the small things that went well and looking for ways to turn them into new habits, an updated working agreement, or a modified Definition of Done. Also, there is no such thing as a perfect Scrum Team where everything is flawless. As soon as you find a team that feels this way, there is a good chance that the entire team is suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect.

2. “The team needs the extra time in order to meet a deadline”
I find this one stated a lot when leadership is pushing the work rather than the team pulling the work. It’s usually leadership that pressures the Scrum Team to cancel the Retrospective because they look at this event as an expendable buffer that can be used for emergencies. This is anything but self-managing and the Product has some big issues if leadership thinks that cutting an hour every two weeks is going to get the team back on track. The funny thing is, having the Retrospective just may be the one thing that could help the team get back on track.

3. “Nothing changes.”
The Scrum Team talks about ways to increase quality and effectiveness but none of the impactful improvements are addressed. Is the team tracking the improvements in their Sprint Backlog and discussing them at their Daily Scrum? At the beginning of the Retrospective, is the Scrum Team discussing the improvements from the previous Sprint? They need to if they are not.

4. “Booooooooring” 😴
It’s the same old Retrospective every Sprint where the Scrum Team revisits the same issues every time and therefore the team collectively doesn’t see any value in having them. The next section provides links to several free examples and templates that you can use to help energize your Retrospectives and tackle several different topics.

Links and Examples to Help Energize your Retrospectives

Chirs Stone: https://www.thevirtualagilecoach.co.uk/retros

There are many free and great Retrospective examples and templates available on the Internet that you should never have to run a boring Retrospective again.

💡 Chris Stone has a website with a boatload of fantastic and fun Retrospective ideas. Each one comes with a template that you can import into Miro and Mural. If you haven’t checked out this website yet, it’s a must. He’s constantly creating new themes that you can choose from depending on what is important to you or your team at any period.
https://www.thevirtualagilecoach.co.uk/retros

💡 Steven Sampson-Jones has also created some fun and interesting Retrospectives that you might find interesting.
https://medium.com/@stevensampsonjones

💡 Then there is the Retromat website. I’ve been using this site for a long time. There are tons of easy Retrospective ideas to choose from.
https://retromat.org