Retrospective - it's good to look back!

I have never dwelled on the past as I am a believer think ahead and move on. Dwelling means you're stopping and to me in life you have to keep on moving! However, it is good to look back and learn from the past, which is different than dwelling. You can think how you did certain tasks and how you would do things better now or in the future. This is what the retrospective ceremony in Scrum is about.

Before you have even completed a sprint, you area already thinking of the next sprint. Conversations are taking place with your PO around prioritising the backlog, what to bring into the next sprint, you are breaking down user stories, you are engaging in Three Amigos meetings. Before you know it one sprint is finished and the next one has started. Agile is not about jumping straight from one sprint to another.

Remember in the 'What is Agile?' blog, I talked about 'inspection and adaption'. We the Agile team need to look at ourselves and inspect how did the sprint go, is there anything we could have done better, what have we learned, what do we need to start doing or stop doing?

Retrospectives are opportunities for ALL the Agile team to get together away from the hussle and bussle of the sprint and reevaluate. Take a step back and look. In sprint reviews you look at what you have produced, with retrospectives you inspect how you have produced it.

There are many different techniques you can use in retrospectives. I strongly recommend the website www.funretrospectives.com , which is full of different activities your team can undertake.

It is good to vary the activities week to week to so they do not become stale, also do not have the same person doing the retrospective each week. Keep the team involved by nominating a different person for each retrospective.

As mentioned, there are many different activities you can run such as 'Liked, Learned, Lacked', 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly', 'Hot-air Balloon' etc but the concept is the same as you look to undercover:

• What went well in sprint?

• What did not go well in the sprint?

• What can we do to improve the next sprint?

Make sure someone captures the actions with owners and they are reviewed at the beginning of the next sprint. The nominee would also write up the retrospective so you have a record of it, useful for management or anyone who could not attend.

In a future blog I will look at the lower level details on how to run #retrospectives from beginning to end.