One of the elements of Agile project management that makes it truly high performance is the Sprint Retrospective meeting. It takes place at the end of a sprint (project iteration) and its goal is to improve the processes being used by the project.
Sprint Retrospectives are the secret that makes the agile project management system so effective in increasing productivity and decreasing costs. That’s because when the project team regularly contemplates their methods and processes, the project becomes highly effective at responding to change and continually improves its own efficiency throughout its life span.
The sprint retrospective is facilitated by the scrum master.
It is the fifth of five scrum events within the scrum framework, which is a part of the larger umbrella of agile project management.
The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to:
- Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools;
- Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and,
- Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the scrum team does its work.
Sprint Retrospective Participants
The sprint retrospective is attended by the scrum team, which consists of the following three members:
- The scrum master facilitates the meeting, provides a safe place to discuss project improvements and asks the right questions to allow the project team to discover what is hindering them in improving product quality and delivery.
- The product owner provides direction to the development team regarding project requirements and priorities for items on the product backlog or roadmap.
- The development team provides the day-to-day project work to produce the project’s deliverables. They provide feedback regarding the processes, relationships and tools necessary to build the product.
Each participant has a unique role to play and everyone should be given enough time to speak. Every project team member has experienced the project in a different way and true process improvement therefore requires everyone’s input.
Sprint Retrospective Agenda
The sprint retrospective meeting asks the following three questions as a mandatory agenda:
- What went well?
- What can be improved?
- What will we commit to improve in the next Sprint?
These are strong generalizations, however, and a more detailed agenda can guide the scrum master in facilitating the meeting. The following techniques can form a sprint retrospective meeting agenda:
- Things that caused frustration
- Reasons for loss of productivity
- Poor quality product features, or those that could have been improved further
- Poorly defined stakeholder requirements
- Information that was not communicated that would have improved a task
- Barriers to communication
- Things that were done on previous projects
The scrum master’s role is to ensure that everyone on the scrum team feels open to discuss whatever grievances they have with the project’s processes and methods.
Self Organizing Teams
The effectiveness of the Sprint Retrospective meeting is highly correlated with Agile Principle #11, which states:
- The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Generally speaking, the presence of managers or executives in a Sprint Retrospective meeting decreases the ability of the scrum team to open up about ways to improve their processes. Agile requires self-organizing teams that analyze their own processes and become more efficient over time, hence taking instructions from a superior is antithetical to the Agile methodology and will decrease productivity over the long term.
Sprint Retrospective Length
The sprint retrospective meeting is timeboxed (maximum) at 45 minutes per week of sprint. Hence, the length is:
| Sprint length | Sprint Retrospective meeting length |
|---|---|
| 1 week | 45 minutes |
| 2 weeks | 1.5 hours |
| 3 weeks | 2.25 hours |
| 4 weeks | 3 hours |
Since the maximum Sprint length should be 4 weeks, the Sprint Retrospective should not be more than 3 hours long.
Scrum Events
The sprint retrospective is the fifth of five scrum events. The full list of scrum events is:
- The Sprint
The essence of scrum is the sprint, a 1-4 week time period in which one product increment is built. After the sprint, a functional, working product increment must be ready for delivery to the customer. The sprint is no more than 1 month, because limiting risk on agile projects requires short increments followed by a review period to adjust course if necessary. - Sprint Planning
At the beginning of each sprint, the sprint planning meeting determines which work items will be included in the sprint. These items are descriptions of functionality, user stories, or similar. The overall project contains a series of user stories called a product backlog. The sprint planning serves to move items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. - Daily Scrum
Once the sprint has commenced, a daily meeting is held between the scrum team to guide the work for that day. Each team member answers three questions:- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What will I accomplish today?
- What impedences are in my way to accomplish this work?
- Sprint Review
At the conclusion of the sprint, the scrum team meets in a Sprint Review meeting to present the completed functionality developed during the sprint. The development team demonstrates working product rather than displaying powerpoint slides or product descriptions. The product owner provides feedback and the product backlog is discussed and updated by mutual collaboration. - Sprint Retrospective
Unlike the sprint review, which is externally focused (project progress) the sprint retrospective is internally focused by giving the project team a chance to scrutinize their processes, especially with regards to people, relationships, processes, and tools.