Contents
What is a Retrospective meeting?
Postmortems, after-action reviews, project success, wrap-ups, typically known as retrospective meetings, are held to analyze the success of a particular project, mainly one involving programming. With the help of the Retrospective meeting, you can improve your team’s efficiency on future projects. In addition, with these review meetings, teams can learn to work more efficiently next time.
These are designed for several purposes, such as teaching, finding wrongs, doing rights next time, improving for the next big thing, training, etc. Therefore, it is important to host your retrospective meeting, keeping some tactics in mind and learning from previous experiences.
As a scrum master, it’s your responsibility to hold a retrospective meeting. But, first things first, what is a retrospective meeting? A retrospective meeting is held to evaluate the past working cycle and team progress. The meeting is held at the end of each iteration of an agile project. It helps collect feedback and all aspects of a project, either good or bad.
When is a Sprint Retrospective Meeting Held?
First thing first and that is timebox, meaning answering the question of when is a sprint retrospective meeting held? In Agile software development, a sprint retrospective meeting occurs at the conclusion of an iteration in a retrospective meeting. These meetings are important and should be held after a sprint review; hence, a sprint retrospective meeting should be held before planning an appointment for the next sprint.
What’s a successful retrospective?
An agile retrospective meeting is considered successful if, after the session and acquiring information, i.e., flaws and positive points from the sprint meeting, the team improves in the next phase. Continuous improvement is a sign of a successful retrospective.
Ideal Format of Agile Retrospective:
Usually, it takes ½ to 1 hour for a retrospective to be complete. Here are the three pillars of a successful retrospective:
Appreciate & Celebrate:
This is important. As a scrum master, you should appreciate the team for their accomplishment and celebrate the new client, a good result, or a feature release. This helps increase the morale of the team and pushes them forward.
Discuss Obstacles:
Retrospective meetings have one purpose, which is improvement for the next phase. These meetings are an opportunity to fix previous issues. After analyzing, teams should discuss the problems and hurdles faced during the last sprint and plan to implement them.
Resolve:
Identify and resolve the discussed obstacles faced in the sprint.
Tips to improve retrospective meetings
Here are some tips you can follow to improve your retrospective meetings:
1. Prep, Prep, Prep:
Before you go to that meeting, as a scrum master, you must analyze and think through everything. You wouldn’t want to go without preparation. There will be questions, answers, and some new ideas to deal with. Hence, it’s important to analyze the whole project and then pick up the points you think should be addressed to improve the next one. Make sure that you’re fair and have a neutral mindset in picking the wrongs of your team.
2. Be critical but not personal:
Again, you should be prepared before throwing some harsh reality on your team. While talking in the meeting, keep an open mindset and listen to everyone. See what others have to say about how you’re leading a project. It’s important to let your team share their feelings about whatever is bothering them.
Rather than playing the blame game, these meetings should be about sharing experiences and learning from them. Of course, people are going to make mistakes; that’s constant. But, playing the blame game is unhealthy for a team. Hence, make sure that everyone shares experiences with a mindset of improving in the next project, instead of blaming another person.
4. Ask questions
Asking questions is important in any organization. And as a project leader, you must ask and address these questions. If people in your team are hesitant in asking questions, make sure they are comfortable. And if they fear asking questions, you should know that something is not going right. It would be best if you let everyone ask questions. This way, the door to more creative ideas and dealing with problems opens. It helps not in the team’s development but also builds trust across people.
5. What can make things better
Now that you’ve asked questions about what went wrong and how things should be, a plan about making things better for the next project. Ideas and solutions are first to a successful meeting, but the most challenging part is execution. Start working on how you can make things better for your next project. How to deal with a particular client? If there are hindrances, as a scrum master, you have to remove these hurdles.
Conclusion
A retrospective meeting is important after a project activity. Hence, paying attention to details and asking the right questions is important. Make sure you do this the right way because your next project depends on it.