Overview

Retrospectives are a way for a team to learn what they're doing right, where they can improve, how to avoid making the same mistakes again and again. It’s time to critically think about how the team is collaborating.

Advantages

📍Time to celebrate success and ponder upon failures. The whole team can appreciate what went well and at the same time have time to come up with improvements for next sprints.

📍Team building event. Retro encourages sharing points of view, discussion, taking team toward a common goal.

📍 Quickly helps to identify key issues and ways to eliminate them.

📍 Builds action plans for improvement steps. Identify what activities need to be performed in the next phase to see an improvement as a team.

Checklist

• [ ] Gather all necessary people Remember of all people who participated in the project during the sprint.
• [ ] Set a recurring time slot. Plan retro as an iterative meeting after every sprint.
• [ ] Decide on the format of the meeting ahead of time. Some retrospective styles are more appropriate for certain situations than others. Think what would fit best, look for some online tools for retrospectives.
• [ ] Be honest & transparent. In general, that rule rocks 😄 however during the retro try not to make personal feedback, be clear about your opinion, use examples.
• [ ] Gather insights & vote. If the team identified more topics to discuss than there is sufficient time allocated in the retrospective, use a voting technique to prioritize topics.
• [ ] Deciding on an action plan. It’s time to brainstorm solutions and changes to team processes, which may include changes to team working agreements. Remember to assign owners to action points.

Pro-tips

Take care of team energy. Start with some easy-going ice breakers or energizers exercises.