THE RETROSPECTIVE MEETING IN SCRUM
- abiodun osoba
- Sep 12, 2016
- 3 min read
A retrospective meeting in scrum is, known also as a sprint retrospective meeting, is held to assess the work carried out by the entire Agile team, and to identify what needs to be done further to improve upon the current Scrum process. Associated primarily with sprint cycles, the retrospective session is basically an “improvement” meeting held to find ways and means to identify potential pitfalls, past mistakes, and seek out new ways to avoid those mistakes. Retrospective sessions are attended by all – the product owner, scrum master, development team members.
The main purpose of having a sprint retrospective meeting is to find what activities and “things” the team is doing well, what activities should be continued, and what “more” can be done to improve the development process. The “inspect” and “adapt” principles play a key role in retrospective sessions.
The team asks three main questions to retrospect:
What worked or went well?
What caused problems, failed to work properly, or did not go well?
What can be done differently in the next sprint to improve the process and overcome the problems occurring previously?
Making the Scrum retrospective more effective
The Scrum retrospective is a very important Scrum event, and should be taken seriously by all team members. It should be ideally conducted in an atmosphere promoting trust and honesty. Retrospective sessions can prove to be effective only when members can collaborate effectively and share their ideas without any inhibitions.
So, how can Scrum retrospective meetings be more successful? A few pointers can help in availing positive results out of the meeting;
Everyone should be able to speak freely and present his or her ideas, however vague or unrelated they may appear to be “at a first glance”. Sometimes a “wrong” idea can invite comments or suggestions which can lead to meaningful and effective discussions. Discussions, in turn, can give birth to solutions.
Team members should not use the retrospectives to promote themselves or their beliefs. Discussions should be carried out which are related to, and affect the topic or issue being discussed.
Efforts should be made to collaborate and avoid blaming individual team members for what went wrong. Scrum is a collective effort, and teams take precedence over individuals. Therefore, focus should be more upon what the “team” did wrong, and what the “team” should do now to improve.
Points and suggestion discussed during the meeting should be implemented in a proper manner. If a retrospective does not include “Call-to-actions” in the end, the basic purpose of holding the meeting is defeated.
ONE COMMON OBSTABLE PREVENTING ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY
One common obstacle I have seen preventing “organizational” agility is the lack of leadership ownership and engagement of organizational agility. This lack of ownership and engagement causes a chasm to form between teams and the leaders.
This chasm causes a mindset at the team level where the teams feel, “we do agile, but leadership and the business still do waterfall.” Leadership also takes a mindset of, “the agile stuff is taken care of by our coaches and scrum masters.” These days organizations should be adopting agile practices throughout, where leaders are driving agility.
Agile is designed to accelerate value, remove waste, improve quality and increase transparency and alignment. All of these things should be of value throughout the organization and not just at the team level.
Due to the larger numbers of teams, the greater complexities of software systems and the ever increasing market competition, it would be senseless not to adopt agile practices at scale in the organization to remain competitive.
Edward Deming says, “It is not enough that management commit themselves to quality and productivity, they must know what it is they must do. Such a responsibility cannot be delegated.” This means that leaders must become agile experts and thereby become the organizations agile leaders.
So, what does this mean?
1) It means leaders must be trained on and then promote the principals of scaling agile throughout the enterprise.
2) After being trained leaders must take action and implement scaled agile constructs throughout the organization that allow for agility across large numbers of people and teams.
3) Agile leaders must address and enhance organizational structures so that they are best suited for product focused value delivery.
4) Agile leaders must create constructs that create visibility and limit work in progress (WIP) at the highest levels in the organization, so that the organization can obtain optimal organizational throughput and the best economic outcomes.
5) Agile leaders must enable the creation of constructs for collaboration, alignment, dependency/risk management and various other lean-agile tools that allow for commonality and guard rails for a large number of teams to interact and work together.
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