As the name suggests, Sprint Retrospectives are an opportunity for Agile Scrum Teams to retrospect/ inspect on their performance during the sprint and come up with a plan for improvements during the next sprint.
The Sprint Retrospective Meeting
The team discusses the following areas during the Sprint Retrospective Meeting:
- What went well in the Sprint
- What could be improved
- What will we improve in the next Sprint
ScrumGuides aptly states the following: “Although improvements may be implemented at any time, the Sprint Retrospective provides a formal opportunity to focus on inspection and adaptation.”
When?
Sprint Retrospectives are done towards the end of each sprint; typically after the Sprint Review Meeting. The entire team, including both the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should participate.
Templates
Atlassian provides several interesting templates that you can use for running the meetings:
- Template 1: The “Start, Stop, Continue” Method
- Template 2: The “Glad, Sad, Mad” Method
- Template 3: The 4 L’s Template
- Template 4: The Quick Retrospective
Similarly, Backlog, a pretty cool Agile Project Management suite, suggests several templates that you can use:
- Template 1: The “Start, Stop, Continue” Method
- Template 2: The “Good, bad, better, best” Method
You need not restrict yourself to the above. There are several templates freely available in Word, Excel, and other formats that one can use.
If you’re using a tool like Confluence or SharePoint, do document the outcome of the meeting. It is essential to capture this to ensure you can review it later to capture trends and incremental improvements that the team has done.
Preparing for the Meeting
Be sure to plan ahead of time to ensure the meeting concludes in the pre-allocated time duration for it. You may wish to time-box each area like “What went well”, “What could be done better”, etc., to ensure there is adequate focus given to each area.
Typically one hour is sufficient to conduct the Retrospective Meeting.
