Agile Retrospective – Where does it fail?
Rajkumar Devakumar, TOGAF®, SAFe® 5, Azure, Camunda
Over the past few years whether it is a right fit or not, Agile is widely adopted by the software development teams in many organizations. It should be a separate debate and I am not going to address it here.
In this post I would like to share some of the common gaps where Sprint retrospective meetings becomes redundant in a scrum team,
#1. Fail to set the stage
After the accomplishment of the Sprint when the team gathers for one of the important ritual "The Sprint Retrospective", most of the times, you can observe that some of the team members writing paragraphs on a post-it whereas some sits idle. At the end, you will hardly get something relevant to the Sprint. This happens when the scrum master fails to set the stage at the beginning of the meeting. This should be done based on time and event.
#2. Not building a self-organized team
How far the scrum master spends his time for coaching his scrum team is still questionable. Not all the organizations have the luxury of having a dedicated scrum master or an agile coach as a scrum master. On the other hand, without providing a right coaching, it is impossible to build a self-organized scrum team. Most of the scrum teams still follows the traditional approach where the team members expecting commands from their lead/manager. This will have a negative impact on all the scrum ceremonies including the sprint retrospective.
#3. Generating insights & Action Items
When you fail on the step one, you hardly have points where you can generate more insights and converting them into action items. If the stage was set properly based on the time and event, it is obvious that the data you have gathered will be around your current sprint and you can convert them into an action items.
#4. Acting upon the Action Items
Assume that you have set the stage right, gathered data, generated insights and converted them into action items. If the percentage of action items getting marked as done is less or none especially if it should come from the management team, then the scrum team doesn’t really trust or lose the interest in giving valuable comments during the data gathering.
#5. Adding fun to the Retrospective
For every sprint or at least for every two-sprint try introduce some fun ways of doing retrospective. You can find various approaches and games from the following resources
Key takeaways
- Provide more agile coaching to the teams, so that they will come out of the traditional mindset.
- Don’t forget to set the stage on a time-event based manner at the beginning of your retrospective meeting.
- Make sure that the management addresses the action items wherever the owner is marked as someone from the management team.
- Try adding some fun in each retrospective meeting.
