Agile Retrospective

The teams that are implementing Scrum, or some derivative of this, has an event calls Retrospective. The Retrospective is a rite where the team meets to the end of every iteration and the goal is to improve, in practice is identifying strengths and weaknesses to decide what and how to improve. The continuous improving remains, what is a base for all agile environments.

Thus, team adapt and change, surviving in this industry that favours velocity and Software on time, being the basis to keep business, to overcome others companies or to find new unexplored markets.

However, this is not only to make retrospectives to accomplish the Scrum process, these are some professional issues that I have seen:

·        What is going on when we proposed 20 improvements to make? I have no doubts that none of these improvements will be done, these are many ideas and is a hard work measure them. These are so many that the team can’t focus on none of them.

·        What do we do in the retrospective? This is not meet the team and say how good, bad, beautiful and ugly was the last iteration. Many participants may be thinking about what tasks they must deliver, and others in the way we are wasting time, or even some grateful to be away from your daily routine for a few minutes.

The above mentioned and many other situations happen during the Retrospective. When the team feels that it is a complete waste of time, then is better stop doing that.

Here, I’m going to mention some bases and ideas to conduct a Retrospective‘s meeting successful:

·        Each team has different needs and situations. Some teams have bad communication, others lack coaching, need learn new ways and practices about how to develop Software, do better Stories, or more test automation. The retrospectives are guided to the current needs of the team.

·        We must have an activity plan, depending on the amount of people and time assigned. Well as to consider the steps that can be: presentations focus people toward retrospective, collect data and situations that occurred during the iteration, find patterns, propose ideas, and finally the close. The book Agile Retrospectives (Esther and Diana) mention the possible phases and detail a number of activities to select during each one.

·        When the team find things to improve, it knows what are the most important. Thus, the team has to prioritize and choose a few (e.g. two). So, the team knows what it will do and must be improve, setting responsibilities as appropriate.

·        In the retrospectives, we work with people, therefore, we have to consider their emotions, energy and attitudes.

And lastly, the retrospective can be use on any team that is dedicated to develop Software or other work too, is not required to use Scrum, only the will to do the job better, be a better team.

I stay with some unknowns: How do I take a retrospective on line? How do I guide the team leader to do the retrospective otherwise? How to choose activities according to the situation of each team?