Perfecting the Retrospective and Continuously Improving the Project

A retrospective meeting can be one of the most powerful activities you can use in an agile project. The concept of retrospectives is not new to project management, “lessons learnt” and “post-mortems” are also retrospectives and are usually held at the end of a project. Where agile development differs is that retrospective meetings are held both during and at the end of an agile project. Doing this enables the development team to take corrective action during a project to improve the next work effort. This makes it imperative to conduct the most inclusive and thorough retrospective possible.

Types of Retrospectives

Normally, in agile environments a Sprint Retrospective is held at the end of every sprint and a Release Retrospective after a release. A Sprint retrospective will include the team and the Product Owner should also be invited. A Release retrospective should involve everyone who played a part in the release. A retrospective meeting needs to revisit all the events in a sprint or release, so do not skimp on the time needed. Set aside an hour for a meeting to discuss a sprint, while a release meeting should be double that, or even half a day, depending on the scale of the project. You are looking to build new efficiencies for your next sprint or release, and this is the best way to identify and implement them. As everyone becomes more familiar and comfortable with the meeting, the time taken should also shorten, while the output should improve. To maximize the effectiveness of the meeting, circulate an agenda and any additional information that should be absorbed before the meeting three to five days beforehand. This encourages the team to apply their minds in advance to any noteworthy wins and challenges experienced.

Retrospective Fundamentals: the Four Questions

The guru of project retrospectives, Norm Kerth, framed 4 questions that can be explored in any retrospective:-

• What did we do well?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What did we learn?
• What still puzzles us?

You will notice that first of all, these are pretty comprehensive questions for reviewing the work under discussion. Secondly, the questions are all framed positively. There is much opportunity for playing the “blame game” in retrospectives, and one of the best ways to avoid this is by using positive language in discussing what happened. There will always have been errors and situations that were not handled optimally; the point of the meeting is to understand why they happened and how to avoid them going forward.

While these questions in themselves are simple, getting the right answers is a lot more complex. If you are facilitating the meeting, you must ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute and offer an opinion, and that they do so. You can collect the feedback either via recording conversations for later transcription or via sticky notes on the walls or whatever the norm is for your organisation.

Recommended Further Reading

The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: