Running a successful retro is essential for the ongoing development of a Scrum team. While it can seem intimidating at first, the process doesn't have to be difficult or time-consuming. With just a few simple techniques, you can ensure that your sprint retrospectives are efficient and productive, putting everyone in a position to learn from past successes and failures alike.
In this blog post, I'll break down all the key aspects of running an effective sprint retrospective meeting so that you can bring out the best in your sprint team!
I’ll cover:
- What Is A Sprint Retrospective?
- Why Should You Run A Sprint Retrospective?
- Who Is Involved In The Sprint Retrospective?
- How To Prepare For Retrospectives
- How To Facilitate Scrum Retrospectives
- 3 Different Retrospective Methods
- What Are Some Issues You Might Run Into? (And How Do You Combat Them?)
- What Do Agile Teams Want Out Of Retrospectives?
- 6 Quick Tips To Elevate Your Next Sprint Retrospective
What Is A Sprint Retrospective?
By definition, a retrospective allows you to look back on past events or situations. According to the Scrum Guide, the sprint retrospective is an “opportunity for the Scrum team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next sprint.”
Makes sense, especially since the focus of agile development is continuous improvement. In order to get better, you have to know which sword to sharpen.
The retrospective should create a safe space for people to share their honest feedback on what’s going well, what could be improved, and generate a discussion around things that should change next time around—with actionable items documented.
Retrospectives can be used for any type of team working on a shared project, but the sprint retrospective is specially optimized for agile teams.
It is one of the ceremonies within the Kanban and Scrum framework that development teams leverage throughout a cyclical product development process often used in software development.
What’s great about the retrospective is that it happens at the end of each sprint, meaning fresh ideas are usually top of mind and can be teased out by the entire team in real-time during the upcoming sprints.
I’ll dig into how this differs from a sprint review, but the main point to remember is that it all boils down to continuous improvement. The purpose of the sprint retrospective is to drive positive change in the project, the team, the account, and potentially the organization.
What’s The Difference Between A Sprint Review And A Sprint Retrospective?
Both the sprint review and the sprint retrospective are Scrum ceremonies used around the world by production teams. While similar—in that they both take place at the end of the sprint—they are separate and distinct exercises and should always be treated as such.
The sprint review creates an opportunity for the team to showcase the work that has just been completed in the latest sprint.
This can be more casual in nature, where a demo of the work is presented to internal team members. It can also be a more formal meeting, where stakeholders outside of the core team can be invited to a showcase.
Regardless of how fancy you want (or need) to make the sprint review, the work should always be fully demonstrable and meet the team’s defined quality in order to be reviewed.
So it’s said, the team is allowed to celebrate their accomplishments and get immediate feedback from sprint review attendees during this meeting.
Once the sprint review meeting is over, the sprint retrospective typically takes place. This is where the team reflects on the work they just completed, offers up kudos for what went well, and identifies suggestions for improvement moving forward. It should be action-oriented, blameless, and adapted to fit your team’s needs.
It is typically facilitated by the Scrum master or digital project manager. Folks on the periphery of the project do not need to—and should not—join. To put it plainly, the sprint review is about demoing the work that was just completed, and the sprint retrospective is about identifying areas of improvement to make the next sprint better.
A somewhat important sidebar is that these ceremonies should be time-boxed appropriately. There are a lot of resources, like this one and this one, available that break timeboxing down a bit more, but in essence, all ceremonies should have strict time boundaries. This helps to ensure the most important topics are addressed in each ceremony.
Timeboxing also helps to reduce unnecessary time spent in agile meetings and creates a more efficient development process. I’m pretty sure that’s something we can all appreciate. Note that timeboxing does depend on the length of the sprint. Let’s take a two-week sprint for example. The sprint review meeting should last a maximum of 2 hours.
After that, the sprint retrospective should only last 90 minutes tops. It may be tempting to extend these, but you will likely experience diminishing returns. Keep them time-boxed and focused!
For more on the other Scrum ceremonies, read about sprint planning here.
Why Should You Run A Sprint Retrospective?
If you’re practicing some sort of agile methodology, chances are the sprint retrospective is already a part of your routine. Ironically, routine might be an issue that some production teams face.
Oftentimes, teams can fall into their rhythm, and vital ceremonies like the daily Scrum and the sprint retrospective can become so run-of-the-mill that teams aren’t using them to their intended advantage. Rest assured, I’ll dive into some ways to mix things up later on.
If you’re asking yourself whether you should run a sprint retrospective, here are a few of the many benefits of agile retrospectives:
- It creates a safe, blameless space for team members to share their valuable feedback
- It allows the team to document wins and areas of opportunity
- It provides an actionable list of next steps and identifies who’s owning which item
- It identifies small, incremental changes that can lead to larger waves of improvement
- It allows teams to use iteration on their process to amplify results
- It allows opinions to be heard
- It helps the team mature
- It makes each sprint better than the last
Who Is Involved In The Sprint Retrospective?
Sprint retrospectives are an important part of product development, bringing together stakeholders to reflect on each Sprint and identify areas for improvement. Those involved in a sprint retrospective include:
- The sprint team: typically developers, designers, and engineers
- Sprint facilitator: typically a Scrum master or product owner
- Observers: who bring an external perspective
- Participants: who have knowledge relevant to the discussion.
The sprint retrospective bears much responsibility for fostering trust, innovation, and teamwork within the sprint team, making it a crucial step in the product development process.
How To Prepare For Retrospectives
Sprint retrospectives provide a great opportunity to reflect on the team's performance and identify areas of improvement. The best way to make sure you're maximizing their value is to prepare beforehand.
First, it's important to start with the right attitude going into the meeting—it's important to approach it with an open mind and be collaborative in your discussion. Second, make sure you set aside time before the retrospective begins so that all participants can provide topics they would like to discuss.
Finally, ensure that everyone is included in the preparation process by giving each participant an opportunity to review data, such as a burndown chart, that can be used as a conversation starter during the sprint retrospective.
By putting these steps into practice, sprint retrospectives become more meaningful and useful for everyone involved.
How To Facilitate Scrum Retrospectives
Think about the last meeting you attended. What made it great and what could’ve been improved? Were you actively engaged and interested in the content? Did you feel like you were in a safe environment to make suggestions or resolve conflict?
These outcomes typically lie in the hands of the meeting facilitator. Facilitators are critical in retrospectives. Consider the role of a moderator in a debate. The moderator’s job is to remain neutral while setting the tone of the conversation, keeping participants on topic, and within set time limits. The same applies to facilitating a retrospective.
As a facilitator, the most important concept to remember is to remain neutral. If the facilitator cannot remain neutral, then it’s best to ask someone outside the team to play the role, so that the person in question can participate.
Let’s discuss an example of a situation where a retrospective would be useful. Suppose the QA team expresses frustration with the development team for waiting until the last day of the sprint to deliver the stories in the sprint backlog. The best plan of action in these instances is to guide the team towards finding the root of the problem.
In this specific example, the facilitator should not focus on the frustration; they should ask generic questions to find out what caused the issue and discuss solutions. The facilitator should know the difference between constructive and destructive criticism and should work to keep the conversation focused to avoid the latter.
Another important technique to remember is to be comfortable with silence. Most teams are comprised of both introverts and extroverts, and while extroverts speak to think, introverts think to speak. As a result, introverted team members may need time to collect their thoughts, and silence may give them an opportunity to think and gently force that participation.
Gathering feedback before beginning the sprint retrospective also allows the team to think through the previous sprint and possibly provide more robust feedback. To gather feedback, the facilitator can either send an anonymous survey out before the meeting or make time at the beginning of the retrospective. Keep in mind that most teams usually prefer anonymity.
Learn more about facilitation in this workshop with Annie MacLeod (you'll need to be a member to access the workshop)!
3 Different Retrospective Methods
There are several interactive strategies for gathering feedback at a retrospective meeting, whether the team is co-located or geographically dispersed. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Sailboat Method
The sailboat method is a recommended metaphorical retrospective that reaches visual learners. A member of the team is asked to draw a sailboat, wind, an anchor, an iceberg, and (optionally) an island. Co-located teams can draw the sailboat method on a whiteboard, while distributed teams might use a tool such as Stormboard or Miro.
The team should then add their feedback to the relevant areas on the picture. The wind represents what items, people, or processes moved the team forward throughout the sprint. The anchor signifies what weighed the team down or kept the team from operating at a higher level of efficiency.
The iceberg would be any unexpected or unforeseen items that potentially derailed the team during the sprint. The island represents sprint goals set by the team.
Affinity Mapping
Affinity mapping is an efficient method for obtaining feedback from a larger group in a short amount of time. First, the team is asked to write down their feedback on sticky notes (real or virtual). Once all feedback is received, patterns should be recognized, and similar items should be grouped.
Each group can be labeled, and the team can discuss high-level label topics. This method is great for organizing a significant amount of feedback into specific categories for general discussion. Scrumblr is an easy and free tool to use if you’d like to try out affinity mapping retrospectives with distributed teams.
The Four Ls
The Four Ls method is a simple way to gather feedback that consists of the team providing insight into what they liked, lacked, learned, and longed for.
- Liked items: anything appreciated in the sprint or that made the sprint successful.
- Lacked items: things that potentially could have brought the team closer to success.
- Learned items: any lessons learned in the sprint that would be beneficial to remember for future sprints or any process changes that could provide higher success patterns.
- Longed for items: things the team desires for success or morale.
What Are Some Issues You Might Run Into? (And How Do You Combat Them?)
Even if sprint retrospectives are new to your team, chances are that some team members that you work with have been a part of these before in a previous role. As with any ritual, there may be varying levels of emotional baggage that you or your team bring to the table, based on previous experiences.
Here are some things you might run into during a retrospective and how to combat said speedbumps:
Apathy
If the same questions are asked sprint after sprint, team members can become less engaged in the answers and stop offering constructive suggestions to improve the process.
Combat apathetic participation by mixing things up! The outcomes of a good retrospective can be reached by adapting different exercises and questions. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to retrospectives—you should iterate on the way you run them. Check out funretrospectives.com for more inspiration.
Emotions
At the end of the day, we are people—and people have emotions. Retrospectives should invite constructive feedback on what could go better in future sprints, but they should never support hostility, baseless negativity, and finger-pointing.
It’s vital for DPMs and Scrum masters to be nonjudgmental and unbiased facilitators during the retrospective meeting. People should feel safe sharing their feedback in these meetings. Be sure to set expectations when you kick off the sprint retrospective, mediate along the way when necessary, and promote a positive conversation.
A Lack Of Conversation
You might have a sprint retrospective where it feels like questions are met with blank stares. Instead of pulling teeth to get the conversation going, come up with a more engaging opening to the meeting, and treat it like the great opportunity to drive incremental change that it is.
Aside from that, you can encourage your team to write their suggestions and thoughts down throughout the course of a sprint. This will give them something to look at during the retrospective instead of feeling like they need to pull anything out of thin air.
Alternatively, you can also consider keeping a log of these yourself (things heard throughout the week, in other agile meetings, or during standups).
Pushback From Leadership
This is a fun one. Sometimes, action items identified in the retrospective impact members outside of the Scrum team. Whoever is owning that item should be working with leadership to develop a conversation around the suggestion and agree on a detailed way to make the requested change. It is possible, however, that leadership will be resistant to the proposed course of action.
If that is the case, keep at it. Find your champions within the organization who will go to bat for the production team and the improvements that stem beyond them.
An agile company or one that values positive change should eventually be willing and open to implementing process improvements that benefit them at large.
Be sure to frame any recommendations in a way that doesn’t single anyone out or cause undue stress.
What Do Agile Teams Want Out Of Retrospectives?
As I set out to write this article, I reached out to several team members in the organization to chat about their experiences with sprint retrospectives. I was curious to find out what different roles—UX designer, developer, and project manager (DPM)—thought about this ceremony.
If you’re just getting started with retrospectives or looking to mix things up, talking directly with team members can be a good place to start. I asked them three simple questions:
1. If Run Well, What Can A Sprint Retrospective Provide You?
- Takeaways on how to improve my personal process and/or role, as well as an opportunity to voice potential team-wide process improvements, have conversations around how to be better as a team, and how to better engage with our clients in the future (Design)
- Help the team identify areas for improvement and provide a platform to talk about values or results the whole team can work on going forward (Development)
- Insight and collaborative feedback into what is going well within the team, what isn’t and what can be improved. The best-case scenario is when the team is guided to create and experiment with solutions to challenges on their own (DPM)
2. If Run Poorly, What Can Happen?
- It can turn into a complaining or bashing session. Another negative is if things are brought up that never end up changing or getting implemented (Design)
- It could result in a missed opportunity for the team to grow as a whole (Development)
- The status quo is kept. While this may be tempting to let pass for the short term, it can have a disastrous long-term effect of changing the culture within the team (DPM)
3. Do You Have A Favorite Question Or Activity That’s Been Asked In A Sprint Retrospective?
- This is a bit elementary, but an effective strategy is to ask the question and then go around a circle where everyone must answer. It gets everyone talking. I’ve been in retrospectives where 2-3 people dominate the conversation, and others don’t say much. Everyone always has an opinion on how the experience went, and it seems people sometimes need a little nudging to speak up, or an opportunity to speak up. Going around in a circle was effective for that reason. Everyone had an answer. (Design)
- I heard about a really cool practice from the Scrum team at Spotify where the agile coach would help the team decide on one thing they could do that everyone thought would make the team and or product better. In one example, they all agreed that every code check-in had to include at least some testing. (Development)
- Ask the simple question, “Does everyone agree with what was just said?” (DPM)
At the end of the day, it comes down to brass tacks. If you’re looking for some sprint retrospective ideas to make your next one more effective, keep reading. Whether you’re stuck in a rut with the same old questions, looking to mix things up, or planning to roll out the sprint retrospective workflow to your team, here are some sprint retrospective examples to get your juices flowing.
6 Quick Tips To Elevate Your Next Sprint Retrospective
1. Keep It Simple
I credit the great team at Mountain Goat Software for this suggestion, but a simple way to make your next sprint retrospective effective is to ask the team what they’d like to start, stop, and continue doing.
For instance, the team may identify that they want to start writing test cases at the time of user story creation. They may decide to stop going over the 15 recommended minutes for daily standups, and they decide to continue experimenting with a new tool that hasn’t become a habit yet.
Regardless of the decisions, make sure you’re asking for mass participation, documenting the suggestions you’re hearing, and vote to determine what happens.
2. Incorporate Novelty
Another technique is to incorporate games & other varying tactics into your sprint retrospectives. Pick one that makes the most sense for your team or project stage, and be sure to run through it at least once beforehand so you’re familiar. These can be fun, effective, and productive but only when the facilitator is prepared!
One of my favorites is the LEGO Retrospective. In this sprint retrospective example, team members are encouraged to use the LEGO blocks to build a structure that represents the last sprint, and one that represents what needs to happen to improve the next one. This abstracts things a little bit and generates some surprisingly productive (and creative) conversations.
3. Stay Focused
Using the Lean CoffeeTM approach, retrospective agendas can be built using kanban boards that are democratically generated. This might be good for a group who can’t seem to stay on topic or who tend to spend too much time on a particular discussion point. Be sure to use different colored sticky notes and markers and identify a volunteer to document outcomes.
4. Make It Action-Oriented
Most simply, but perhaps most importantly, make sure you’re assigning anything actionable to someone on the team. They don’t all need to fall on the project manager. In fact, they shouldn’t.
The conversation can be as constructive and helpful as possible, but the ripples will not be felt unless the change is implemented across the team. Keep a list visible for everyone to see, and make sure that expectations and deadlines are set.
5. Bring In Outside Perspective
If you’re looking for some backup, it could be wise to bring in an agile coach to help with retrospective facilitation. There are a lot of experts out there who can tease out some of the finer points of the conversation and help to drive change for the team. An outside perspective can be a huge turning point!
This may come at a premium (and may not be required unless there are significant struggles), so another great solution would be to invite another teammate to the conversation. Those unrelated to the project can help shed light on the important comments and act as a neutral third-party.
If you don’t have access to a team member, you can look into using a retrospectives tool that’s designed to give structure and support for the process.
6. Keep It Fresh
Switching meeting formats is a refreshing way to foster participation from teams who may have become complacent with the norm. Using a new method from time to time gives the team something to look forward to and may make these meetings more exciting for the participants.
If teams use the same method for an extended period, they may feel that the retrospectives have plateaued. If the same questions have been asked for multiple retrospectives, there may be a decline in participation.
You’ll know when participation is declining when a retrospective consists of a “quiet majority,” which is when most of the team members rarely speak out unless they’re specifically called on.
There may even be team doubt, which would result in comments such as “Why are we doing this when we never do anything about it” or “Nothing needs to change.”
Remember that the team may lose traction or the desire to participate if no movement is made on any of the action items that have been taken in previous retrospectives.
As mentioned before, keeping a list of these items and tracking them through completion will allow the team to recognize the value in your retrospectives.
Related Read: 21 Ideas To Get Quiet Teams Talking In Sprint Retrospectives
Over to You
Sprint retrospectives are an essential part of the Scrum process, but they don't have to be complicated or time-consuming.
By taking the time to understand what makes a retrospective effective, and following the simple steps laid out in this post, you can ensure that your team is always moving forward, learning from both its successes and failures.
You also might be interested in reading about project retrospectives, which differ slightly from sprint retrospectives.
If you want to learn more about how to run successful sprint retrospectives, subscribe to the DPM newsletter. We'll send you tips and tricks straight to your inbox, so you can master the art of running retros once and for all.
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