Retrospective - Another meeting ?

This blog is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing Agile. 

Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work.


The retrospective is one of the most important events in the sprint. This is the only time team is focusing to improve itself. 

Some anti-patterns in a retrospective are : 

1) No one is willing to speak up (either good or bad) 

2) Team members forget the feedback and looking forward to the next sprint 

3) Team members think their feedback is not important and nothing will change 

4) Team members are worried about retribution
 
5) Tone of the meeting (complaint meeting) 

6) Style of recording the feedback 



Recommendation for SM(Scrum Master): 

1) Come up with your own list of observations to facilitate the dialog. Specific instance/s where the team worked together to handle a surprise and instance/s where the team struggled to complete the planned scope

2) Build an impediment page where team members can add their retro items at any point in the sprint. This list could be a good starting point for the retrospective discussion

3) SM should make sure all the agreed retro items are planned in subsequent sprint cycles. Appropriate user stories are created to track the effort and completion 

4) SM should make sure members outside the team and other managers do not join the retrospective and the team feels safe to share their feedback for improvement 

5) SM should set the context that the intent of retrospective is not to complain but the opportunity to identify areas of improvement to take the scrum team to next level

6) Feedback recorded should be easy to comprehend, create 3 buckets: Start(new improvement), Stop( cease current style or activity) & Continue( Keep doing it). The feedback can be saved either on a whiteboard for a co-located team or digitally. 

7) Building trust is an important activity and SM should find opportunities outside work to let team members know each other 

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