The Agile Pocket Guide: A Quick Start to Making Your Business Agile Using Scrum and Beyond

Chapter 15

The Retrospective

Team members can be brutally honest. Their honesty needs an outlet. Team members can also be hesitant to share. Their input is valuable, and we need it. A retrospective meeting is a perfect place to enable your entire team to talk about the latest sprint. It is a moment for the team to take a breath and reflect, to find things that worked well, things that needed improvement, and areas of opportunity to improve for the next sprint (Figure 15.1). Everyone must participate and answer the questions on the agenda.

Figure 15.1 Three Retrospective Workshop Exercises

Often the retrospective can be put on the back burner and ignored at the end of a sprint. Do not fail to have a retrospective. Put in a user story card during the iteration to set out time for this meeting if you have to. This retrospective allows your team members to build confidence in one another, inspect the process, adapt, and give you, their Leader, an opportunity to motivate the team and receive feedback. (See Figure 15.2.)

Figure 15.2 The Leader Motivates the Team during a Retrospective

The attributes of the retrospective meeting include the following:

• It happens after every sprint.
• It includes the entire Team and the Product Owner.
• It is a safe haven for feedback of any kind (as long ...