Agile Retrospective, A TEAM GAME CHANGER!
My experience working with a cross-functional diverse team as an Agile coach has revalidated the great benefit and importance the agile retrospective ceremony has in building teams and products especially in the world of software that is constantly being challenged with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.
The Retrospective shortly called Retro is the most critical Agile ceremony that is performed at the end of every sprint.
Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
This quote has been recited in various disciplines and it is not any different in software development.
Lessons from the past may not always ward off doom, but they can provide insights into the present and even the future.
The goal of retrospectives is to help teams continuously reflect and improve their way of working to deliver great results. “Retrospectives can make your organization faster, more efficient, and innovative.” Retrospectives are crucial for the team to improve continuously.
An agile retrospective forces the entire team to pause and reflect on what transpired and discuss what worked and what didn’t during a particular project.
Retros are held at the end of an iteration, the team reflects on what happened, how to become more effective, and actions for improvement going forward.
The team answers these three questions:
- What went well?
- What didn’t go well?
- What can be improved?
In conducting successful retrospectives these points might serve as a roadmap for you to get started.
- Set the stage: You want to set an environment where everybody feels safe to participate, fully attentive, and honestly share with the team. The goal of this first phase is to establish an open and enthusiastic ecosystem for the team to be mentally present and ready to reflect and share. Because people had already been working on their task before the session, setting the stage gives everyone a chance to context switch and be present
- Gather data: The goal of this phase is to give your team the chance to look back at your iteration to figure out what happened, as well as create a shared understanding across the team. This phase helps to get everyone on the same page, It expands everyone’s viewpoint, and creates alignment about what’s most important in the team
- Generate insights: Generating Insights encourages the team to think deeply about issues, to uncover the root cause of why certain things happened. And then brainstorm on a possible solution. In this phase, teams typically identify why things happened and what should be done more, done less, and tried out.
- Decide what to do: the goal of this phase is to create action items to improve in the next iterations. This means that the insights you discovered during the last phase of the retrospective must now be translated into Action Items or experiments so that the team has the opportunity for improvement. This includes deciding on specific, meaningful, agreed, and realistic actions for the next sprint.
- Close the retrospective: The goal is, to sum up, the results of our retrospective. reflect on and how to improve it, and appreciate accomplishments of the team, also encourage individual interactions. Everyone should leave the room with the feeling that we achieved something useful and that the meeting was worth it.
It is important to inform the team of this important rule of “What Happens in the Retro Stays in the Retro.” to increase trust and create a sense of psychological safety, also the team should feel comfortable knowing that nothing that is discussed in the retro leaves the room.
If you must discuss the retro session outside of the team, then you need to ask “If there’s anything discussed today that we want to share transparently with others?”
The answer might be “no” But if the answer is “yes,” document what The Team has authorized to be discussed outside the room. whichever answer received “no or yes” is fine.
The key is focusing on turning this feedback into action going forward. When improvements are identified, they should be documented and put in place, then revisited in future retrospectives to see if any difference was made. While they may be awkward at first if participants aren’t as comfortable being open with their honest feedback, repeating the process regularly will breed familiarity and a routine that opens up the team to more potential.
I hope you find this article helpful for your team retrospective.
