Sprint Retrospective Guidelines

Owned by melat mamo
Last updated: Jul 22, 2013
2 min read

Sprint Retrospectives are fundamentally a technique used to reveal the practices and behaviors of the scrum team

reflecting on themselves and their work, producing an actionable plan for improving. 

 Goal

 The goal of sprint retrospective is to build a common understanding of the past sprint and learn lessons from it.

What practices worked well? What do we need to improve? 

 Attendees

  • Team
  • Scrum Master
  • Optional: Product Owner and Project Manager

Timing 

 If meeting time is not effectively limited, these meetings are at a high risk to become general discussions and consume considerable amounts of time and energy from all participants.

The sprint retrospective meeting is time boxed to: 2 hours.

 Agenda 

  • Take a joint look back at the past sprint
    • What significant things happened throughout the time of the sprint?
    • Arrange these events on a timeline for all the team to see
  • Identify the things that worked well in this sprint
  • Identify the things that did not work well in this sprint
  • Identify the things that could use improvement
  • Identify what needs to be done to address each of these problems
  • Group items that can be addressed together
  • Prioritize lists: Most important items to the top

Ground Rules 

  • Accept everyone's opinion without judgment
  • Do not interrupt
  • Turn off mobile phones
  • Stay focused on one topic at a time and listen to each other.
  • Respect time-box (start on time, end on time)

 Conducting the Meeting

In the Sprint Retrospective a Facilitator or Scrum Master:

  • Introduce the goal of the meeting
  • Review the agenda and present the project performance data that was assembled prior to the meeting(e.g. Burn down chart ) 

  • Get everyone talking at least once through an introductory question to which everyone is invited to respond

  • Get the team to answer:

           1.What went well in this Sprint?

            2.What happened in this Sprint that could use improvement?

   3.What could be improved in the next sprint? basic questions and facilitates the discussion.

  • The scrum master or  facilitator writes down the team’s answers on the board (key points on their timeline before explaining them to the group)
  • Group suggestions that reflect similar thoughts together.
  • The team prioritizes in which order  wants to talk about the potential improvements.
  • The team needs to discuss issues and make decisions.
  • Finally ,identify some actions to be followed up on in the forthcoming sprint to help address the improvement areas.
  • Document agreed upon actions as sprint retrospective output.