Sprint Retrospective
What is sprint retrospective? Sprint retrospectives usually happen after the Sprint Review and before the next Sprint Planning. They help a Scrum team review its process and identify opportunities to improve it. It is reviewing what have we done. The purpose of sprint retrospective is:
- 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
- Create: a plan to improve the way the Scrum team does its work.
How to do a sprint retrospective?
- Create a grid of four questions
Create four boxes with 2×2 matrix. Each box entitled: appreciations, puzzles, risks, and wishes. And then draw one box in the middle entitled: actions. Here are some questions to be answered in each box:
a. Appreciations: What did you like during the previous iteration?
b. Puzzles: What is puzzling you right now?
c. Risks: What didn’t work so well?
d. Wishes: What are your improvements ideas? - Start the discussion
After the team members fill in the boxes, you may start a discussion. This discussion is forbidden for a one-man talk. Let all the team members participate and explain their idea. - Vote
What to vote? First, vote on the most relatable opinions. Don’t matter which box. How much opinions to choose? Depends on how much inputs from the members. Maybe ¼ most important opinions can be appropriate. - Get on with the actions
After seeing the most relatable opinions, what actions your team will take? Write it down in the actions box. Put aside everyone’s ego is the key here.
Those are 4 steps of sprint retrospective. It may sound cliché, but this kind of sprint retrospective works out well. In Rodrigo Riberio’s (Engagement Manager of OutSystems) case. It speeds up about 3 to 4 times compared to traditional development style. He pointed low-code’s speed and scrum style also played a role. I guess this type of retrospective is worth to try.
