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Sprint Retrospective

Why we do them, and tips for fun and engaging retros.

Continuous Improvement / Kaizen​

Kaizen is a Japanese concept in business studies which asserts significant positive results may be achieved due the cumulative effect of many, often small (and even trivial), improvements to all aspects of a company's operations.

Kaizen is put into action by continuously improving every facet of a company's production and requires the participation of all employees.

This lends itself nicely to Agile software development and Scrum in particular. At the end of a sprint, the Retrospective allows for reflection on the previous 2 weeks. I've never experienced a retro where there were 0 suggested improvements. These are always useful.

Wisdom from Retrospectives​

Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge and experience with good judgment.

The retro is only as useful as the actions it produces. The individual (usually the Scrum Master) in charge of running the Retro should immediately make any actions official so they are tracked and ready to be undertaken by the team.

Wider Retrospectives​

Looking introspectively is a great way to identify problems or pain points in your SDLC/process, but getting together with other engineering teams and doing company-wide Retrospectives can help as well - albeit these should be few and far between.

"It's good to learn from your mistakes, it's better to learn from other people's mistakes" - Warren Buffet

What makes a good Retrospective?​

  • Openness
  • Honesty
  • Accountability
  • Fun

Stick to these principles and you can't go wrong.

Being open and honest about issues with the team or the team's process is the only way to identify problems. You can still have a no-blame culture and call out annoying/dumb things that happened.

Accountability is the trickiest principle to master. No one wants to be the one that messes up - but put your pride aside and own up. If you don't acknowledge your mistakes, you can't learn from them.

Fun​

This deserves its own section. From my experience, fun is the key to an effective Retro.

Icebreakers​

A good Icebreaker gets everyone smiling and engaged. It's a good rule of thumb to make sure everyone responds to the Icebreaker at the start and to give everyone's answers some airtime.

Note: These should take no longer than 5-10 minutes.

These don't even have to be work related, some examples:

  • What was your favourite Cartoon or TV show growing up?
  • If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
  • What was your first ever job?
  • Which TV show has the best theme song?
  • Play a super quick game (Say what you see, The price is right)

Templates​

There are so many collaboration tools and templates out there, so feel free to explore and find your own, here are few examples: