Template for a Good Scrum Retrospective
The Scrum Retrospective meeting is one of the more “mysterious” Scrum meetings. It’s not as well defined as the other Scrum meetings, like Sprint Planning for example. If we read the Scrum Guide, we see that It’s the continuous improvement meeting, it closes the sprint long learning feedback loop, it’s not about the work but about how we work, and it’s owned by the team, but that’s about it.
This article is about defining a clear template for what you want to achieve in the Retrospective and how you want to organize and run it. It’s not the only way to do it, but I think it’s a good starting point for most teams.
The 3 Objectives of the Retrospective Meeting
My objectives for a good Retrospective meeting are:
Social. A safe place for any and all team members to express appreciation, frustration, satisfaction, confusion or any other positive or negative feelings they may have about the Sprint that just ended
Creative. A place and time to brainstorm, consider new ideas, come up with new perspective
Incremental Action. Specific improvement actions that are small enough to be planned for the next sprint
I don’t think a retrospective works well without catering for all these 3 objectives. Retrospective that cater to Social only are good avenues to let steam off, but in the absence of actions they will start to feel pointless and ineffective.
On the other hand, Retrospectives that are exclusively action driven and “too serious” leave no room for Social and Creative will feel too much like “regular work” and enthusiasm and participation will be low.
You need a balance between all three. The right balance might vary from team to team or during the lifetime of the team, but all three are required.
You need an Agenda: Here’s one you can use
Freestyle Retrospective meetings that rely on the team members simply saying and debating things without any structure really don’t work well unless the team is exceptionally mature. Even then, it might not be ideal.
A good Retrospective agenda is:
Specific and clear enough to give structure and encourage participation
At the same time, flexible enough to allow for ad hoc interaction and creativity
Example agenda for a one hour Retrospective:
10 min: Review progress on actions agreed last Retrospective (ideally, they should all be done, since actions taken at Retro’s are actions we plan to do in the next Sprint)
15 min: Starfish exercise (or similar) to extract ideas, suggestions and feedback for this meeting
35 min: Discuss starfish output. Some of it may be Social, some Creative, some may lead to specific Actions for next Sprint
The Actions for the next Sprint should be:
Few (2-3 at most)
Written as User Stories with all the good properties of User Stories (INVEST, Definition of Done, Acceptance Criteria etc)
Taken to the next Sprint Planning to be planned as any other User Story. The Product Owner comes with feature development user story from the Product Backlog, the Team comes with a few improvement User Stories from the Retrospective. It is expected that 80-90% or more of the capacity of the team will be used for Product Backlog User Stories, but wise teams and PO’s do invest some time in continuous improvement as well
Close by reviewing the list of agreed Actions for next Sprint
How to organize and facilitate the Retrospective as the Scrum Master
First key point is to consistently organize the Retro meeting every Sprint.
As anything else in agile, your facilitation and leadership as a Scrum Master should be “Just Enough, Just in Time”:
Don’t micromanage the meeting, give it enough flex for people to manifest themselves and to explore ideas
At the same time, don’t let it get completely off track
Specifically, as the Scrum Master you typically:
Schedule the meeting
Start the meeting
Go through the actions from last time
Keep an eye on the agenda and move things along
Intervene to move thing along if they get significantly off track
If discussions are vague and seem to be going in a circle, you ask the right questions or otherwise guide the conversation towards a decision or an action wherever possible
Verbalize decisions: ok, so we’ve decided …. ok, so we have the action to ….
Manage all the tools you may use, take notes etc
Summarise actions at the end
Send meeting notes email after the meeting
As the Scrum Master, you are not the “boss”, so you don’t get to decide what actions are ok or not, or what is more important. However, as the Scrum Master, you have the authority, and you should, gently but firmly push the conversation and the team members towards:
Contribute and bring their perspective to the table
Getting from general points to specific actionable decisions
Don’t focus on specific actual work items (like the technical solution for a particular item), but on “how we work” items: how we organize ourselves, how we communicate, engineering practices to follow etc
Asking them to decide what actions they want to take on for the next Sprint
Brining them back on track if the meeting gets derailed
Asking clarifying questions and probe for details if something is lest vague or if you feel something important it left unsaid
Also, as a Scrum Master, you can also act as a member of the team: bring your own ideas, perspective and issues to the table, based on your experience as the Scrum Master. It’s fine for you to give feedback to the team or to suggest actions yourself. Just remember that you can’t force your point of view and your voice is just one of several.
Tools to use in the Retrospective
For things such as Starfish, you may want to use a tool to gather feedback from the team, including anonymously if you so choose. I typically prefer non-anonymous feedback, but if the team is shier or newer, or for whatever reason doesn’t seem to say much, try anonymous feedback to get more from them.
Collect the feedback live during the meeting to get maximum participation. When you get to the Starfish section, share a link to everyone and just keep silent for 5 minutes or so and let them type in their feedback. Then, share the screen with all the feedback and go through it together.
There are specialised tools for this, but you can use something as simple as a Google Form.