Teams don’t always seem inclined to do retrospectives. Without gentle prodding most of our teams would often skip the retrospective and move on to the next sprint instead.

Retrospective is the second most important event in Scrum because this is your best chance to improve!

Without retrospectives you will find that the team keeps making the same mistakes over and over again.

Move off to a closed room, a cozy sofa corner, the rooftop patio, or some place like that. As long as we can have undisturbed discussion.

W e usually don’ t do retrospectives in the team room, since people’s attentions will tend to wander.

Participants: The product owner, the whole team, and myself.

We allocate 1 – 3 hours depending on how much discussion is anticipated.

The Scrum master shows the sprint backlog and, with help from the team, summarizes the sprint

Each person gets a chance to say, without
being interrupted, what they thought was good, what they think could have been better, and what they would like to do differently next sprint.

Look at the estimated vs. actual velocity. If there is a big difference we try to analyze why.

When time is almost up the Scrum master tries to summarize concrete suggestions about what we can do better next sprint.

A sprint retrospective is not only about how this one team can do a better job during next sprint, it has wider implications than that.