Full Answer
What is the purpose of an agile retrospective?
- Set the stage - get the team ready to engage in the retrospective, perhaps with a warm-up activity such as Plus, Minus, Interesting (PMI) (5 minutes).
- Gather data - create a shared picture of what happened during the retrospective (10 minutes).
- Generate insights - discuss what was successful and identify any roadblocks to success (10 minutes).
What are the 3 important questions in daily scrum?
- Development Team members must be on time for the Daily Standup.
- The Daily Standup duration is a maximum of 15 minutes (time box).
- The participants stick to the Daily Scrum Meeting Agenda and answer only the 3 Daily Standup questions (see below).
What are the steps in the Scrum process?
- Create Project Vision
- Identify Scrum Master and Stakeholder (s)
- Form Scrum Team
- Develop Epic (s)
- Create Prioritized Product Backlog
- Conduct Release Planning
What are the roles and responsibilities of a scrum master?
What are the duties and responsibilities of a Scrum Master? The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that each team member follows the framework of Scrum. They make sure everyone knows their role and helps coach them through any unclear parts while also guiding larger teams using this method effectively.
What is retrospective scrum?
The Scrum sprint retrospective is a timeboxed meeting that takes place after the sprint review and before sprint planning. Its purpose is to: Examine how the just-completed sprint went as far as people, relationships, processes, and tools. Identify and order what went well. Do the same with things that didn't go well.
What is a retrospective in agile?
A retrospective is anytime your team reflects on the past to improve the future. Between technical and non-technical teams, you can retro on just about anything!
What are the 3 retrospective questions?
Three things you can do todayWhat went well (keep doing these things)What could be improved (went OK, but could be better)What went badly (don't do these things again)Focus for next period/sprint/month/quarter (One or two things to focus on)
What is the purpose of the sprint retrospective certify?
The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to: Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools; Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and, Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.16-Nov-2017
What happens in a retro?
Definition: A retrospective is a meeting held after a product ships to discuss what happened during the product development and release process, with the goal of improving things in the future based on those learnings and conversations.
What is the point of a retro?
A Retrospective is a ceremony held at the end of each iteration in an agile project. The general purpose is to allow the team, as a group, to evaluate its past working cycle. In addition, it's an important moment to gather feedback on what went well and what did not.21-Nov-2014
How do you perform a retrospective Scrum?
You may try the steps interactively by visiting the interactive product tour.Step 1: Prepare for a 'Start, Stop and Continue' retrospective. ... Step 2: Discuss what should start doing. ... Step 3: Discuss what should stop. ... Step 4: Discuss what went well. ... Step 5: Vote for the most important items. ... Step 6: Wrap up the meeting.
How do you run a successful retrospective?
How to run a remote retrospective with your teamStep 1: Create an environment of psychological safety. ... Step 2: Figure out the agenda and logistics. ... Step 3: Review the recent past. ... Step 4: Discuss candidly, but respectfully. ... Step 4: Decide what you'll take action on before the next retrospective.More items...•14-Sept-2021
What should I ask in retro?
In short, a 4 Question Retrospective gets the the team to reflect on the last, short period of time working together (often 2 weeks) and answer four specific questions: What went well? What didn't go so well? What have I learned?
What went well in retrospective?
A What Went Well retrospective helps scrum teams focus on how they felt they performed during a sprint. With just two prompts, it offers a great way of streamlining your retrospective meeting, boosting team member self-esteem, and diagnosing pain points.
What should a sprint retrospective say?
Questions to ask when closing a sprint retrospectiveCan you reiterate the most important thing you learned today?How are you feeling about our next sprint now that we've identified these issues?Is anyone confused or unclear on any of the items we discussed today?Do all of our next steps make sense?More items...•18-Aug-2020
What is the difference between sprint review and retrospective?
The key difference is that a Sprint Review focuses on improving so the team can deliver a better product, whereas a Sprint Retrospective focuses on improving the overall system so the team can work more harmoniously and find flow together.
Discuss The Team's Purpose
A purpose is the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. A clear, inspiring and ambitious purpose will invite...
Circle of Influence & Concern*
Prepare a flip chart with 3 concentric circles, each big enough to put stickies in. Label them from inner to outer circle: 1. Team controls - direc...
Choose A Different Location
Choosing a different location for the Retrospective might do wonders. Leave the office for once. Choose for example a coffee bar, public park or ev...
Ask Someone Else to Facilitate The Retrospective
Although the Scrum Master should support the team to continuously improve themselves, this doesn't automatically mean (s)he always the Retrospectiv...
What is retrospective tool in Scrum?
The Scrum teams can use the retrospective tools to gather inputs, reflect, and retrospect. With the tools, you can engage effectively and carry out an action-oriented meeting with the team members that are remotely located. These tools will save you a lot of time in executing your meeting.
Why do we do retrospectives?
Reasons for the retrospective: document every answer and post them for everyone in the team to see.
Why use Sprint retrospective template?
Sprint retrospective template will save the Scrum team a lot of time because it will clearly define what to start, stop, and continue doing; thereby making them hit the ground running. The template is always flexible and can accommodate changes if necessary.
What is a sprint retrospective?
In Scrum project management, sprint retrospective is the ceremony of the scrum team to inspect their activities and develop a plan to improve their next sprint.
What is Sinnaps for scrum?
For instance, Sinnaps is a free online team collaboration tool that supports the scrum team for their retrospective tasks.
What is sprint review?
sprint retrospective, sprint review is a ceremony meant for the stakeholders for the purpose of inspecting where the stage of the project is, it is centered on what was built in the last sprint and the overall product while sprint retrospective is meant for the team to inspect their last sprint of a project.
What is retrospective in project management?
A retrospective is the ceremony held by a project team at the end of a project’s iteration to discuss what was successful the project, where there could be improvements and how the successes and improvements can be incorporated into future projects.
What is a sprint retrospective?
Whereas the Sprint Review is an opportunity to inspect the increment, the Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the team to inspect themselves. During this event, the team discusses how the Sprint went regarding individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and their Definition of Done.
Who facilitates a Scrum event?
The Scrum Guide leaves this point open, but it’s usually the Scrum Master who facilitates the event in practice. I would recommend that the Scrum Master encourage others to facilitate the event, too, because this tends to bring out different perspectives and a different focus, which can benefit the team. Have the Product Owner facilitate some events or ask the Developers to take turns. Teams might also consider having guests - such as IT resource managers or security SMEs - attend or even facilitate the event, especially if there are organizational or technical issues impacting the team that the resource manager might help resolve.
How to brainstorm improvement ideas?
To take the brainstorming idea a bit further, first, ask team members to brainstorm improvement ideas. Tell them the sky's the limit and come up with anything that they think would be helpful. As a group, plot each idea on a graph with importance on the Y-axis and feasibility on the X-axis. Identifying the most feasible and most important ideas can help the team select the ones to carry forward into the next Sprint.
Can a Scrum Master facilitate brainstorming?
If the team is very vocal, the Scrum Master can facilitate brainstorming improvement ideas. This exercise is not something that the Scrum Master should rely upon for every Retrospective because it can become boring after a while. However, when used sparingly, this simple facilitation technique can be effective.
What is a retrospective in Scrum?
A Retrospective is a special Scrum ceremony that forces teams to pause and reflect on what transpired and discuss what worked and what didn’t work during a project.
How to introduce retrospective in Scrum?
Actually, there are different ways to introduce it. A Scrum Master can be trained on how to run and maintain an effective Agile retrospective. Then the whole team can start doing Retro meetings and reflect. You may start practicing Retrospectives in a stealth mode, not using the term retrospective. Call it an evaluation and gain skills gradually.
Why is retrospective important in Agile?
Therefore Agile promotes Retrospectives to help teams to solve problems and improve themselves. One of the most vivid retrospective benefits is that these ceremonies give power to the team. When team members feel empowered, they do not feel resistant to do the changes.
What is the best thing about retrospectives?
Another great thing about Retrospectives is that the actions that are agreed in a meeting are done by the team members, without hand-over. Everyone analyses what happened defines the actions, and team members do them. All this makes the Retrospective a better way to do improvements.
Why is it important to have an open culture in retrospectives?
It’s rather important to have an open culture in Retrospectives where team members speak up. People should truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, considering their abilities, skills, and the resources available.
How to summarize a meeting qualitatively?
In order to summarize the meeting qualitatively, you have to end up the meeting with a clear summary of the past Sprint, an action plan, and a clear process for feedback and measuring results.
What to do after recognizing shortfalls?
After having recognized shortfalls, it is time to understand the causes that will guide your team for smarter solutions. Make sure that all your team members have the right influence to address the problem (as some problems may seem too big to be solved at your scale).
What is Sprint Retrospective?
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, which are attended by all – the product owner, scrum master, development team members, and optionally with the stakeholders.
How long is a sprint retrospective meeting?
Length of Sprint Retrospective Meeting. The thumb rule for the length of a sprint retrospective meeting is that it usually take no more than 45 minutes per week of sprint duration. The following table illustrates this rule: Total Sprint Duration. Sprint Retrospective Duration. 1 week. 45 minutes. 2 weeks. 90 minutes (1.5 hours)
Why do we have a sprint review meeting?
At the end of the Sprint a Sprint Review Meeting is conducted to allow the Scrum Product Owner to check if all of the committed items are complete and implemented correctly for deployment.
What is visual paradigm?
Visual Paradigm help organizations stay competitive and responsive to change faster and better in today’s fast changing environment. Our award-winning products are trusted by over 320,000 users in companies ranging from small business, consultants, to blue chip organizations, universities and government units across the globe. It enables organizations to improve business and IT agility and foster innovation through popular open standards and process frameworks.Visual Paradigm, a killer Agile feature in 2018, introduced Scrum Process Canvas for automating the way a Scrum team to create, manage and deploy software application that empowers the team to continuously improve their performance at unprecedented speed and scale.
Why is it important to change the format of a scrum retrospective?
To keep the team focused, it's nice to change the format of the scrum retrospective once in a while and come up with something new , which will liven up the meeting and give it a new flavour. It is also necessary to assess whether the same retrospective format is still suitable for all types of situations and problems we face in projects.
What is the purpose of retrospectives?
The goal is just to change the format to something new, more interesting, to keep the team engaged.
What happens when all the labels are accompanied by this big moment?
When all the labels are accompanied by this "big moment", everyone reads the name of the team member written on the card and the success he attributes to him. The named person then reads what he wrote on their card.
What is a winning streak?
Winning streak is a retrospective format that we can use if you want to turn one win (sprint) into a winning series. It is built on the principle of reverse engineering towards victory. It works on the principle of examining the basic components of victory and on how to ensure that these components reunite, sprint after sprint.
Why do project managers use retrospective?
Every good agile project manager works with retrospective, as it is a great tool to get information from the team and how to push it forward. Probably each of us is happy in our comfort zone and the same goes for meetings. Let's get out of there and do some retrospective.
Can retrospective techniques be done online?
In the previous part, we focused on antipatterns, now we will focus on bringing different retrospective techniques to different team needs. Almost all of them can be done online using the right online tools. If you are more interested in more forms of retrospective that work more with teams, that do not work so well, do not miss the continuation of this article. We will focus on techniques that work with challenges on projects.
How to do an Agile retrospective?
These five stages are presented in the book Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. They are: 1 Set the Stage 2 Gather Data 3 Generate Insights 4 Decide What to Do 5 Close the Retrospective
How many action items per retrospective?
Therefore I make sure that my team creates a maximum of 3 action items per Retrospective so we can keep the focus on the few most important items.
What action item to put on top of backlog?
If your team is sure that they want to work on that with high priority, then the action item might be “Create a user story for 2-factor authentication and put it on top of the backlog”.
Why do you want action items to be small?
You want to make action items small enough so that they don´t have an impact on the amout of planned work for the upcoming Sprint. At this point in the Retrospective you don’t want to commit to work on a big action item.
What can you do to fix a problem in Scrum?
Make clear to the team that Scrum is an empirical approach—you are working with a try-measure-learn loop.
Where to put stickies in scrum?
You place the stickies with the action items at a place where the team can see them. Usually I put them on the physical scrum board, which is at the team area. Additionally, you can use some “screaming” colors, like pink or orange, so that they stand out on the board.
Why are small action items important?
Having small action items makes sure that they will be completed. Then your team will be consistent in making sure that action items are always finished.
What are the downsides of retrospectives?
The biggest downside is that it only really supports 1 type of workflow or retrospective. We couldn’t change the tag options and then we had to recreate categories for our retrospectives to then drag ideas into the right ones. We couldn’t sort the ideas based on votes and it was hard to see where the actions we captured went and were tracked. It was a bit troublesome having to tag each idea every time as it interrupted the train of thought. The cost price is low enough if you need an alternative to a free retrospective tool to see if your team loves it.
Why do people use retrospective meetings?
People tend to use retrospective meetings as an outlet to complain and bicker about their problems instead of actively trying to solve them. So as a BA turned scrum master working with a small team of other scrum masters, working with a few face-to-face, distributed and remote teams. We wanted something that was people-centered, action-oriented, and tech friendly.
How does Sprintlio work?
As one of the pricier options, Sprintlio lets you run retrospectives that integrates a team health check as part of each meeting, sends you statistical information about your meeting and provides a dashboard that shows team participation and the number of action items completed Team sentiment is based on the number and type of emoticons used by participants during the retro and an emoticon based rating at the end of each meeting You can add additional documents, comments, code snippets and upvotes to ideas. In terms of idea capturing, the ideas are named and it’s up to each person to make their ideas anonymous. There is also a presentation mode that basically changes the contrast and size of font on the ideas and the option to run a randomly selected retro.
What is a scatterspoke?
ScatterSpoke is a well rounded online retrospective tool and although they don’t have health checks, radars or a facilitated workflow, their retrospective process works well. Similar to GoReflect, it feels like a perpetual retro that can be run continuously as there are no defined steps in the process. Scatterspoke is another free retrospective tool which can be used for some retrospectives which don’t require things like anonymity, private voting, integrations, timers and other facilitator controls. An interesting and rather novel aspect of Scatterspoke is that it reads through what teams have said on their cards and uses semantic analysis to track words that indicate what the team sentiment is from one retrospective to the next. (This is limited to your last 2 in the free version). This might be a way to use language choice as a way of seeing if your team is positive, neutral or negative. There is also the idea of a parking lot if ideas don’t fit into a category and can be reclassified at a later stage. So if you don’t’ suffer from FOMO and don’t mind seeing features you can’t have, then Scatterspoke is a great free tool that lets you gather and group ideas.
What are the needs of Scrum masters?
Things like being, providing extra data or value to the retrospective process, fitting the credos of Agile and having a range of facilitator features to make the experience less time consuming and pain-free. Integration is another key component that my company asked for as you want to not just capture action items but also push them into your workflow, so that was a key decider in which tool to use. – Jason.
What is GroupMap tool?
GroupMap is a really interesting tool. They are primarily a brainstorming and meeting collaboration tool with a huge range of templates, and customisable options that leaves you spoilt for choice. You can even add your own background image to brainstorm around and there are lots of facilitator options to manage participants, workflow and getting everyone from one stage of the process to the next, whilst still allowing you to go back a step if needed. What really stands out is that you can create not just a list, but also things like charts, blank walls and mind maps so you can use it beyond just a standard retrospective. There is also a survey and polling feature so you can create other question sets that are part of your retrospective. There are other ways of prioritising beyond dot voting and it’s like a Wix for meetings where you can create maps where people engage. There’s still independent voting, actions and reporting which can be exported. The cost is per facilitator rather than per team, although in some cases it could mean the same thing. The summary? GroupMap is like a swiss army knife of template choices that lets you create more than just a standard retrospective meeting and can be used for a multitude of team planning, meeting and decision making purposes.
What is TeamRetro?
Easy and effortless, TeamRetro really is a very well designed and intuitive tool for running team retros as well as team radars and health checks. (It’s also the one we went with.)