The Retrospective

Objective

Improve the Agile Delivery Process through critical self-examination of the completed iteration.

Participants and Responsibilities

• Sprint Team Lead
  • Schedule the meeting and invite participants.
  • Host the meeting and run the agenda.
• Sprint Team Members
  • Contribute helps, hinderances, and identify any unplanned work that impacted the sprint velocity.

Scheduling

Sprint retrospectives should take place either on the last day of a sprint or as the first activity on the first day of the new sprint. Allocate 30-60 minutes.

Example Agenda

1. 10 minutes - Review committed stories in the sprint.
2. 10 minutes - Complete “Rose/Thorn/Bud” feedback.
3. 10 minutes - Review feedback as a team and create actions to address the issues identified.

After the session, the team lead should:

• Log any “technical debt” as stories (or features!) in the Architecture epic.
• Move any incomplete stories to the next sprint.

All stories in the previous sprint should be marked as complete. If they aren’t, they should be moved to the current sprint.

The team should aim to have zero stories carried over to the next sprint. Any stories that are carried over should be reviewed and measures taken to prevent incomplete work for subsequent sprints.

Guidance

Try not to overthink the category definitions too much, but this is overview might be helpful:

After collecting feedback, use Affinity Clustering to identify themes in the items. Identifying related topics in this way will make it easier to find ways to address the feedback and improve delivery processes for the next sprint.

Alternate schemes for gathering feedback include:

• “Mad, sad, glad”