how do you conduct a sprint retrospective meeting

1. Set the goal of the meeting. Establishing the goal of your sprint retrospective up front helps your team focus on the task at hand.
2. Collect team feedback. Your team is the best source of information you have to improve your sprint process. ...
3. Draw insights. Now that you’ve gathered data from your team asynchronously, you can identify patterns and common threads during the retrospective meeting itself.
4. Set action items. Now it’s time to create action items to address common pain points. ...
5. Close the meeting. Set aside a few minutes at the end of your sprint retrospective to close out your meeting. ...

Full Answer

What to say in sprint retrospective?

Sprint Retrospective Ideas to Facilitate Your New Techniques

• Routine is Good and Practice makes Perfect. Clichés, yes, but important ones. ...
• Start with an Icebreaker to Warm Up the Team. ...
• Create A Sense of Responsibility. ...
• Balance Negative and Positive. ...
• Leave with a Concrete List of Tasks. ...

How long should a retrospective be for a sprint?

How long should a sprint retrospective take? Sprint retrospectives are limited to a maximum of three hours. The general guidance is to allow 45 minutes for each week of sprint length. So a two-week sprint would cap the sprint retrospective at an hour and a half; a four-week sprint at three hours. ...

Who participates in sprint retrospective?

Who Participates in a Sprint Retrospective Meeting? The sprint retrospective is usually attended by the entire Scrum team, including the Scrum Master, Product Owner and Developers.

Why do we need sprint retrospectives?

The sprint retrospective is a critical part of the agile cycle as it allows a team to continuously and actively improve and adapt throughout the life of a project. What makes a good retrospective? In my opinion the most important element of a successful retrospective is being able to have everyone speak in an open, honest and constructive manner.

How do you conduct a sprint retrospective?

How to perform a sprint retrospective in 6 stepsUse Miro's free retrospective templates. You don't need to start from scratch. ... Schedule your sprints. ... Invite your team. ... Ask the right questions. ... Work to improve your processes. ... Discuss how it went.

How do you conduct a retrospective meeting?

How to run a remote retrospective with your teamStep 1: Create an environment of psychological safety. ... Step 2: Figure out the agenda and logistics. ... Step 3: Review the recent past. ... Step 4: Discuss candidly, but respectfully. ... Step 4: Decide what you'll take action on before the next retrospective.More items...•

What do you do in a sprint retrospective meeting?

Its purpose is to:Examine how the just-completed sprint went as far as people, relationships, processes, and tools.Identify and order what went well.Do the same with things that didn't go well.Identify potential improvements.More items...

What are the 3 retrospective questions?

Three things you can do todayWhat went well (keep doing these things)What could be improved (went OK, but could be better)What went badly (don't do these things again)Focus for next period/sprint/month/quarter (One or two things to focus on)

How do you prepare for a retrospective?

To follow, break up your Retrospective into the following five stages:Set the Stage.Gather Data.Generate Insights.Decide What to Do.Close the Retrospective.

What should I talk in retrospective meeting?

Questions to ask when closing a sprint retrospectiveCan you reiterate the most important thing you learned today?How are you feeling about our next sprint now that we've identified these issues?Is anyone confused or unclear on any of the items we discussed today?Do all of our next steps make sense?More items...•

Who is responsible for retrospective meetings?

Typically, the Scrum Master runs a sprint retrospective meeting, but other team members can act as a facilitator. The attendees of a sprint retrospective include the Scrum Master, the product owner and members of the development team; they all engage in design, development and testing.

Who is responsible for facilitating the sprint retrospective meeting?

The ScrumMaster can facilitate this sprint retrospective meeting by asking everyone to just shout out ideas during the scrum. The ScrumMaster can go around the room asking each person to identify any one thing to start, stop or continue.

What do you discuss in a retrospective meeting?

Teams should hold a sprint retrospective after a sprint review and before the planning meeting for the next sprint. During the retrospective, evaluate what happened throughout the development and release process, and discuss ways to improve things in the future.

What do you say in a retrospective meeting?

Questions to ask when closing a sprint retrospectiveCan you reiterate the most important thing you learned today?How are you feeling about our next sprint now that we've identified these issues?Is anyone confused or unclear on any of the items we discussed today?Do all of our next steps make sense?More items...•

What does a good retrospective look like?

The retrospective should create a safe space for people to share their honest feedback on what's going well, what could be improved, and generate a discussion around things that should change next time around – with actionable items documented.

How do you hold a successful retrospective?

6 Tips for Better Product Retrospective MeetingsCreate a safe space. ... Make retrospectives a habit. ... Don't forget to look at the positives. ... Think outside the office. ... Bring in backup. ... Sometimes your product retrospective meetings need retrospectives of their own.

Who needs a sprint retrospective?

If your team uses Scrum, you should conduct a retrospective at the end of each sprint. Scrum is a type of Agile methodology most commonly used by product, engineering, or software development teams. However, any team that wants to build and iterate quickly can benefit from using Scrum and conducting regular sprint retrospectives.

Why is a sprint retrospective important?

That’s why a retrospective is built into each sprint—so the Scrum team always has an opportunity to record and incorporate their learnings into the next sprint. That way, each individual sprint functions as a learning cycle for teams to refine their sprint planning process.

What is a sprint retrospective?

A sprint retrospective, also known as an agile retrospective, is a meeting held by a team at the end of a sprint to review its process and identify opportunities to improve it.

How long should a retrospective meeting be?

Some suggest setting the length of a retrospective meeting based on the length of the sprint – for example, a 30-minute retrospective after a weekly sprint and a 3-hour at the end of a monthly sprint.

What is retrospective in Agile?

According to Agile retrospectives: Making good teams great, "team issues are as challenging as technical issues – if not more so".

How to encourage team to be honest?

There are several ways to encourage your team to be honest and direct in their retrospectives: Encourage everyone to write up their thoughts in advance. Team members might be more hesitant to bring up touchy subjects during a face-to-face meeting. Make sure every stakeholder contributes to the shared document.

Who wrote the Scrum Guide?

According to the Scrum Guide, written by the founders of Scrum Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the purpose of a retrospective is to:

Is sprint retrospective the same as sprint review?

Sprint retrospectives are often confused with sprint reviews, but they are not the same.

Is asynchronous retrospective needed?

Asynchronous retrospectives are not just for remote teams, and just because you can bring your entire team together in the same room at the same time, doesn't mean you should. Synchronization is always a bottleneck when it comes to team communication, but the good news is – in most cases, it's not needed.

What Is A Sprint Retrospective?

According to the Scrum Guide, the sprint retrospective is an “opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.” Makes sense, especially since the focus of agile development is continuous improvement. In order to get better, you have to know which sword to sharpen.

Why is sprint retrospective important?

This is what you want to strive for! Sprint retrospectives can be a ceremony that people look forward to most because it should create a space to assess how process improvements have gone and allow for more suggestions to follow.

How long does sprint retrospective last?

Let’s take a two-week sprint for example. The sprint review should last a maximum of 2 hours. After that, the sprint retrospective should only last 90 minutes tops. It may be tempting to extend these, but you will likely experience diminishing return.

What happens if you ask the same question sprint after sprint?

If the same questions are asked sprint after sprint after sprint, team members can become less engaged in the answers and stop offering up constructive suggestions to improve the process.

What is sprint review?

The sprint review creates an opportunity for the team to showcase the work that has just been completed in the latest sprint. This can be more casual in nature, where a demo of the work is presented to internal team members. It can also be a more formal meeting, where stakeholders outside of the core team can be invited to a showcase. Regardless of how fancy you want (or need) to make the sprint review, the work should always be fully demonstrable and meet the team’s defined quality in order to be reviewed. So it’s said, the team is allowed to celebrate their accomplishments and get immediate feedback from sprint review attendees during this meeting.

Is routine an issue in production?

Ironically, routine might be an issue that some production teams face. Often times, teams can fall into their rhythm, and vital ceremonies like the sprint retrospective can become so run-of-the-mill that teams aren’t using them to their intended advantage.

Can leadership be resistant to a suggestion?

Whoever is owning that item should be working with leadership to develop a conversation around the suggestion and detail ways to make the requested change. It is possible, however, that leadership will be resistant to the suggestion.

How long is a sprint retrospective meeting?

Length of Sprint Retrospective Meeting. The thumb rule for the length of a sprint retrospective meeting is that it usually take no more than 45 minutes per week of sprint duration. The following table illustrates this rule: Total Sprint Duration. Sprint Retrospective Duration. 1 week. 45 minutes. 2 weeks. 90 minutes (1.5 hours)

What is Sprint Retrospective?

The retrospective session is basically an “improvement” meeting held to find ways and means to identify potential pitfalls, past mistakes, and seek out new ways to avoid those mistakes, which are attended by all – the product owner, scrum master, development team members, and optionally with the stakeholders.

Why do we have a sprint review meeting?

At the end of the Sprint a Sprint Review Meeting is conducted to allow the Scrum Product Owner to check if all of the committed items are complete and implemented correctly for deployment.

What is a sprint retrospective?

The sprint retrospective is a recurring meeting held at the end of a sprint used to discuss what went well during the previous sprint cycle and what can be improved for the next sprint. The Agile sprint retrospective is an essential part of the Scrum framework for developing, delivering, and managing complex projects. Since the early 1990s, Scrum has been used to develop:

How does a Scrum Master facilitate this process?

The Scrum Master can facilitate this process by asking attendees to call out ideas during the Scrum, or they can go around the room and get feedback on what to start, stop, and continue in a more orderly fashion, person by person.

What is a Scrum Master?

The Scrum master is also the process coach for the Scrum team, pointing out when it is not adhering to an agreed-upon method of proceeding and providing ideas and expertise as needed. Stakeholders and managers who are not directly part of the team usually don’t come to a Scrum retrospective unless specifically invited.

What affects how the Scrum team develops the product?

Everything that affects how the Scrum team develops the product is open to discussion and improvement, including processes, tools, artifacts, environment, and so on. It allows development teams to adapt Scrum to their particular circumstances.

When was Scrum used?

Since the early 1990s, Scrum has been used to develop: Networks of interacting function. Continuous, iterative improvement is a core goal in Scrum product management, and the Scrum retrospective meeting is an official opportunity to achieve this at defined, consistent intervals—when teams have wrapped up a sprint and have a space to reflect ...

Can sprint review and retrospective be held simultaneously?

While some teams might be tempted to hold a sprint review and sprint retrospective simultaneously, the meetings work better if kept separate, so only the relevant parties attend, and the purpose of the meeting is clearly understood by all involved.

What to do if you have run a retrospective?

If you’ve run a Retrospective previously, quickly revisit the themes and actions from last time to build a sense of continuity.

How to improve teamwork?

Identify how to improve teamwork by reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and why. We recommend running a Retrospective with your team every couple of weeks or at the end of a project milestone.

What is sprint retrospective?

Sprint Retrospective is the last scrum event in Sprint. It’s an opportunity for the scrum team to inspect itself and plan for improvements in the next Sprint. The sprint retrospective is at most a 3-hour meeting for four weeks of Sprint. For shorter Sprints, the duration will be shorter proportionately.

How is Sprint Retro conducted?

Sprint review, like any other sprint event, needs to be planned , and there are best practices that need to follow to maximize the benefit of this event.

What should we do if the Product Owner is a client and the team is not comfortable in retro?

So it's likely that the team may not open up in front of him, and not voice the concerns or improvement areas they see.

What is the role of the Scrum Master in a Sprint?

The Scrum Master is responsible for sending out the invites and ensuring that meeting happens every Sprint.

What happens if the team doesn't feel safe enough to reveal the real issues?

If the team doesn’t feel safe enough to reveal the real issues because outsiders are attending, then the retro will lose its effectiveness. Category: Scrum By Virender Singh June 22, 2020.

Why is it important to have a Scrum Master meeting?

It’s vital that this meeting should not turn into finding faults. The idea is to inspect and adapt as a team. This meeting can also be an opportunity for team members to praise the other team members’ efforts.

Why is Sprint important?

It creates transparency and builds trust among team members. It also gives them a sense of ownership, that it's their Sprint, and they are in control of how it's run.

What is a sprint retrospective?

Unlike the sprint review, which serves as a means of reviewing the product or increment the team has worked on during the sprint with an eye toward immediate deployment, the sprint retrospective is designed to study the process the team used to carry out the sprint, and to decide on one or more actionable items they can carry into the next sprint.

What is the final stage of a retrospective meeting?

As a final stage of the retrospective meeting, the team should decide on at least one executable action item to carry into the next sprint in an effort to improve the process.

Why use a white board for comments?

As observations are made and discussed, it may be helpful to use a white board or sticky notes to track comments, stay organized and make sense of the discussion.

Why is retrospective important?

Individual and team expression: Another great reason to do a retrospective is that it allows the team to express themselves. This could be the good, the bad, or the ugly, but it is still important that the team, product manager, and scrum master know what the overall sentiment is. These meetings can be extremely important and really unearth certain things about projects, team dynamics, and work in general.

How long is a meeting spot booked?

A meeting spot booked for at least 1 hour – it can be in an office room or it can be an online meeting like a Zoom or Google hangout etc.

Why do we do retros in Agile?

Conducting retros helps you look for ways to learn from your past work and help make things go smoother in the future . We will see the specifics of this in the section below on – Why you should do it.

What does retros reveal?

Address current wins and challenges: As mentioned earlier, retros can reveal what went well, and what didn’t. Examining what went well can help you continue doing what you’re doing and harness these positive outcomes. The same applies for what didn’t go well. Discussing what didn’t go well can help create valuable lessons learned so you can avoid them in the future.

How to avoid saying "John was constantly absent the last sprint"?

Focus on the work, not specific people. E.g. avoid saying something like John was constantly absent the last sprint and this set us back, or he wasn’t pulling his weight in this last sprint and now we are really behind. Instead, aim for things such as, the team took on too much work or underestimated the stories for the sprint.

What are the three things covered in a meeting?

So, now that we know it’s a meeting to discuss past work and ways we can improve moving forward, what exactly is done in this meeting and how does it go? There are three major things covered in this meeting: What actions would you start ; what actions would you stop, and what actions would you continue doing.

Is retrospective work a waste of time?

Some managers and other individuals are against doing retrospectives. Some believe it is a waste of time and doesn’t bring value to the team. Others think that taking 7 or 8 members of the team and sitting them in a room just to discuss the last couple of weeks of work is a real financial drain and a costly meeting.