Retrospective

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hi, I'm Ray Sheen.
• 00:05 And I'd now like to talk about one of the final activities that's part of
• 00:09 the Agile Scrum sprint process.
• 00:11 And this is the lessons learned session known as the Sprint Retrospective.
• 00:16 The Sprint Retrospective is just that,
• 00:18 a retrospective look at the sprint that just completed.
• 00:22 This meeting is a lessons learned meeting and
• 00:24 it's purpose is to improve the sprint process.
• 00:27 It's not a design review or another sprint demo meeting where the shortcomings from
• 00:30 the first sprint demo are addressed.
• 00:33 It is normally conducted immediately following the sprint and
• 00:36 prior to the next sprint.
• 00:38 That way the lessons to be learned are still fresh in everyone's mind and
• 00:41 the improvements can be immediately implemented.
• 00:44 The participants are the scrum master, product owner, and all the scrum team
• 00:48 members, senior management, business team members are not invited.
• 00:52 Remember the focus is on the sprint process, not the sprint deliverables.
• 00:57 If senior management has a process comment they should filter that in through
• 01:00 the product owner or the scrum master.
• 01:03 The focus is on continuous improvement, not assigning blame or passing out awards.
• 01:08 That doesn't mean that the team can't hold each other accountable.
• 01:11 If a team member frequently miss scrum team meetings,
• 01:14 the team should address that issue with the individual but no personal attacks,
• 01:19 just keep things factual and focus on process.
• 01:23 I do that by asking two questions.
• 01:25 The first question is,
• 01:26 what did we do well in this sprint that we want to continue to the next sprint?
• 01:30 This is used to reinforce the good habits and practices.
• 01:33 It can also be a not very subtle way to encourage other team members in best
• 01:38 practices.
• 01:40 By complimenting several individuals for how well they did a particular task or
• 01:44 activity, it can be a teaching moment for
• 01:46 the others who did not do things in that way.
• 01:49 I will sometimes stop and ask someone to explain how they did a best practice and
• 01:53 to describe the benefits that came from it.
• 01:56 The other question that's asked is, what can be improved in the next sprint?
• 02:00 The team may come up with a dozen ideas, or almost none.
• 02:04 If they have a lot of ideas, pick just a few and work on those.
• 02:08 If they don't have any ideas, and the sprint results were really good, well,
• 02:12 that's okay.
• 02:14 But be sure that you reinforce the answers from that first question about what
• 02:18 are the things we did well.
• 02:20 Let's look at the roles, responsibilities, and
• 02:22 deliverables here in the sprint retrospective.
• 02:25 The scrum team, scrum master, and product owners are all participating and
• 02:30 providing their comments.
• 02:32 The scrum master is normally facilitating this session and consolidates
• 02:35 the recommendations in order to remind the team during the next sprint and
• 02:39 to share these with other scrum masters in the organization.
• 02:43 As already mentioned, senior management does not attend.
• 02:46 Notice that this is not a final report of the project for
• 02:49 senior management or stakeholders.
• 02:51 That report would likely come in the form of the sprint demo minutes.
• 02:56 This meeting is a continuous improvement process meeting.
• 02:59 In my experience, these meetings take about an hour.
• 03:02 May take a little longer at the first but after a while they often get shorter.
• 03:06 So let's go back to the example I've been using before which was a museum
• 03:10 website upgrade project and look at what came out of their retrospective.
• 03:15 An answer to the first question they thought that the estimates were
• 03:18 pretty accurate.
• 03:19 That the team worked well together with everyone sharing ideas and opinions and
• 03:23 they found the scrum team meetings to be very helpful.
• 03:26 All of those were things they want to continue as they move to the next sprint.
• 03:31 They also identified a few areas for improvement.
• 03:34 One was an earlier identification of roadblocks, in one instance a scrum
• 03:38 team member spent nearly two days trying to work through a roadblock.
• 03:42 Once the scrum master was finally involved,
• 03:45 it was resolved within just a few hours.
• 03:47 This will be a tough one for the team because asking for help has historically
• 03:51 been viewed as a sign of weakness or laziness in the organization.
• 03:55 The second item they identified for
• 03:57 improvement was to have more meetings with the product owner.
• 04:01 Since some of the activities involved a certain amount of aesthetic and
• 04:04 graphic design decisions, these were hard to document in the demo criteria.
• 04:09 What was needed was input from the product owner to determine if the scrum team
• 04:13 members were proceeding along a good direction.
• 04:16 To improve this,
• 04:17 we decided to have the product owner spend about a half hour after each scrum team
• 04:21 meeting with team members to review anything that they wanted them to look at.
• 04:27 An important principle of Agile is continuous improvement.
• 04:30 The Sprint Retrospective enables this.
• 04:33 And by holding this after the completion of one sprint and
• 04:37 before the start of the next sprint,
• 04:39 it gives everyone a chance to immediately apply the lessons learned.

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