4 things to do in Retrospectives

What gets measured gets improved! Retrospectives help your team improve the way they work. After each sprint, the team reflects over the experience they just had and works together to fix any issues that came up. With effective retrospectives, the team continues to focus on making things better, learn from their experience and get better.

There is no right or wrong answer as different teams have different ways of doing retrospectives. Broadly there are 4 steps involved in retrospectives,

1. Set the stage

The goal and focus of the meeting needs to be clarified in the beginning. It could be as simple as – “increasing defects in recent sprints” or “incorporating design changes effectively”.

Also, it is best if everyone in the team gets to talk in the beginning to ‘break ice’ and feel comfortable in sharing their opinions later.

2. Gather data

Once the stage is set, the team goes over all the events of the last sprint. The team goes over the sprint timeline discussing the work that was done and the decisions that were taken. Team members often vote on these events and decisions to determine whether they were high points or low points for them individually.

3. Generate insights

Once the data gathering is complete, the team can then look into the events that seemed to be the most problematic during the course of the sprint. The team tries to identify the root causes of the problems and spends time thinking about what can be done differently in the future. Teams can use something like the fishbone diagram in this step.

4. Decide the next step

Once the improvement options are available, the final step is deciding which improvements can be implemented next sprint onwards

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