Retrospection is key to understanding and self-awareness. Similarly, sprint retrospective is used by agile and scrum teams along with the rest of agile ceremonies to monitor their performance and manage their work.

Scrum works under the assumption that customers regularly change their minds about what they want or need. This dynamic environment requires scrum meetings such as the daily standup meeting, sprint planning or the sprint retrospective, where team members can collect themselves and ensure that everyone is working together towards the customer’s current needs.

In order to deliver quickly and adapt to changes, scrum teams work in short durations of one month or less called agile sprints, where a sprint retrospective is held at the end of each sprint. A sprint retrospective meeting is just as it sounds, a time of reflection. But it is more than a mere acknowledgment of what has passed in previous sprints: it offers lessons that provide direction forward.

What Is a Sprint Retrospective?

A sprint retrospective gives the entire team a moment of introspection. They can stop and look back on the sprint, discuss what happened, analyze the way they worked together, identify how it might have been improved and then make plans to implement those improvements in the next sprint.

The sprint retrospective is usually held as the last activity of the sprint. It is a good idea to repeat the sprint retrospective on the same day time and place. They can last for between an hour to three hours, depending on the sprint length.

When you’re performing a sprint retrospective you want to capture any good ideas that come up which can then be applied to future sprints. ProjectManager is cloud-based work and project management software that has multiple project views. You can execute your sprint on kanban boards but the task list is a great tool to collect the highlights of your sprint retrospective. Now they’re in the software and can be assigned, tracked and even automated in future sprints.

Who’s Involved In a Sprint Retrospective Meeting?

The entire team is present for the sprint retrospective. That includes the scrum master, the product owner, the development team and everyone who is designing, building and testing the product. Although, it is not unprecedented for the scrum team to seek outside insight and perspectives.

While the sprint retrospective gives everyone in the agile project management team time to look back on the sprint, it also helps them to identify and agree on a continuous process of improvements that can be turned into actionable tasks in the present and future.

Related: Free Agile Sprint Plan Template

The Scrum Master’s Role in a Sprint Retrospective

The scrum master is the person who is facilitating the process of a sprint retrospective. They are there to make sure the team is looking at what happened over the last sprint so they can develop new ways to improve performance in the next.

While a scrum team is self-organized and can pivot quickly as needed, the scrum master helps with the flow of information to make their decisions more effective. Therefore, without a scrum master to help the team, the pathway towards an improvement process can be slow. That’s why scrum masters commonly use project management software equipped with kanban boards and other task management features to streamline the sprint planning, review and retrospective process.

Related: Best Kanban Software

Sprint Retrospective: What’s Addressed?

There are three main questions that are asked in the sprint retrospective: What went well during the sprint, what did not go well and what could be improved for better productivity in the next sprint? These questions, and the whole sprint retrospective, are facilitated by the scrum master.

Although those are the primary questions asked in a retrospective, nothing is off the table in terms of what can be talked about, as long as it relates to the overall sprint that just occurred. This is a critical function of the scrum workflow in that it gives the scrum teams an opportunity to fine-tune their behaviors and actions to better serve the product creation.

Related: What Is the Definition of Done for Agile Teams?

Sprint Retrospective Agenda

As with any meeting, a sprint retrospective will have an agenda to organize it and keep it on target. That doesn’t mean every sprint retrospective agenda is the same. They can vary from company to company and even project to project. However, most will share these main points.

Upfront you’ll want to set the goal of the sprint retrospective. Once a goal has been determined, the next step is to gather the essential data from everyone present to get their perspective. From this shared information, identify patterns and see the big picture. You’ll want to ask why things happened the way they did.

Before the sprint retrospective ends, the agenda should have a moment in which everyone decides on what the next steps will be. You have identified issues and challenges, now come up with an action plan to respond to each. Then you can close the retrospective by summarizing the meeting, thanking everyone for their participation and thinking about how to improve future sprint retrospectives.

Sprint Retrospective Questions

Questioning is at the heart of a sprint retrospective. There are questions you can ask before the retrospective while brainstorming and data gathering, when reviewing and then at closure. Here are a few from each of those sections.

Before

• Does everyone agree with the agenda?
• Is there anything to add to the agenda?
• Does everyone understand the agenda?
• During brainstorming/data gathering
• What went right in the sprint?
• What went wrong in this sprint?
• What can we do in the next sprint?
• What have we learned from the project?

In Review

• How can we fix what went wrong?
• How can we overcome these issues in the future
• How can we help our fellow team members

At Closure

• What did we learn today?
• Do the next steps make sense?
• Is everyone clear on what they have to do?

These are just some questions. The project will determine what you ask and there is no limit to the amount of questions that can be posed. However, the sprint retrospective should only last about one to three hours. You want to stay on point and not burn out your team.

How to Conduct a Sprint Retrospective

The sprint retrospective is a recurring meeting and it will be different each time you have a session. However, it has some essentials that are needed to keep it productive. Below are some best practices for sprint retrospectives that will help you run a more productive meeting.

Plan Ahead

Figure out ahead of time how you’re going to run through the sprint retrospective, and make the most of your limited time. Just as a plan is crucial for running a project, it is as important for smaller tasks like this. Without a plan, time is wasted, and less productive work comes out of the sprint retrospective.

Engage People

The sooner you engage people, the more likely they attend the meeting with something to say. You can do this by having them read something related to the process, which will pique their interest and bring them to the table with ideas to share.

Create a Space

You’ll want to have a dedicated place in which to hold the sprint retrospective, one that is private and open to a free discussion and engagement from the team. That can be a semi-circle of chairs around a whiteboard or something more. If you’re working with distributed teams, consider how to get them to feel like a participant and not a spectator.

Have Action Items

This is like an agenda, so you start the sprint retrospective off with something to talk about and a focus to keep the conversation moving in a productive direction. It helps to visually post these action items, so they’re accessible to all involved.

Begin with Previous Retrospective Action Items

If you’re not reviewing past action items, then you’re not monitoring the progress of the improvements brought forth in previous sprint retrospectives. Look at them as experiments: what did you try, what were the results and are they worth keeping up with?

Don’t Forget to Have Fun

Yes, it’s work, but it doesn’t have to be torturous. The more fun you can inject into the process, the more you’ll get out of it. People are more engaged when they’re having a good time. That doesn’t mean chaos; just remove the heavy, dire nature of many meetings, and remember that you’re all working together for the same goal.

Related: 10 Super Fun Team Bonding Games

Sprint Retrospective Examples

Let’s take a look at some examples of a sprint retrospective. For example, if you are building an app and the last sprint was on getting the user interface design. Maybe you feel it’s overly complex. Takes up too much memory. Are there ways to simplify it? Perhaps there can be fewer steps that a user has to take. That can be applied to the next sprint.

Another example of a sprint retrospective could be the creation of a retail website. The last sprint was adding images to the site. However, the type doesn’t wrap around those images properly. The team brainstormed ideas and came up with a way to reduce the size of the images while keeping them legible.

These are very simplistic examples, but they give you an idea of how the sprint retrospective works. It’s a review of past work, a brainstorming session on what could be improved and then a plan on how to implement those improvements in the next sprint.

Sprint Retrospective Ideas

Scrum is always looking for improvements. It’s not scared of change; it embraces it. With that spirit in mind, let us end with suggestions to improve your sprint retrospective.

1. Start with an Icebreaker: In order to have teams hit the road running, you want to make sure they’re comfortable with one another. While they might work together, they may have been dedicated to different tasks or possibly working remotely. Therefore, get the ideas flowing by notifying everyone beforehand and offering some simple, icebreakers to get them thinking. They could be one-word answers to simple questions or an emotional gauge of how they felt about the previous sprint.
2. Have the Previous Sprint Goals and Improvements on Display: Tack them up for all to see to get people started on discussing how these improvements panned out and what goals were and weren’t met. You can analyze the results later, but getting people talking first is going to give a better picture of the process and where it works and where it doesn’t.
3. Don’t Fall into Routine: This is easier said than done because if it worked once, you’re likely to revisit it. But routine can be the kiss of death. People lose engagement and productivity is lost. Try a start-and-stop meeting, asking the team what they think they should start doing, stop doing and continue doing. Set up the meeting like an awards show, with the best story, most annoying story, etc. There are lots of creative approaches to meetings you can research and apply.
4. Do a Retrospective of the Retrospective: It doesn’t hurt to put the process under the microscope. Not only will this create a more engaged and less routine-like sprint retrospective, but it’ll provide guidance as to what is working and not working in the process itself. It’s not only the sprint that might require improvements.
5. Change the Facilitator: Yes, it’s traditional for the scrum master to facilitate the sprint retrospectives, but that doesn’t mean it’s the law. The scrum master will be present to keep things within bounds, but it can really help stir things up and offer new perspectives to have others take the helm.
6. Start with Why: Another way to get the blood flowing is to question the whole process. Why have a sprint retrospective in the first place? You might get a few who take the bait and agree, but more likely you’ll find people stepping over one another to explain the importance of the process. There’re a few better ways to open the retrospective with more genuine engagement.
7. Get the Taboos on the Table: There are always going to be those who have unspoken concerns or criticisms about the sprint or other aspects of the work. With the assurance of complete confidentiality and no reprisals, have these taboos shared in a silent meeting where everyone is given a sheet of paper on which to write down their biggest unspoken taboo. Now shuffle the papers and pass them out for others to comment on. Let them go all around the room until the original paper returns to its author. Then destroy the papers. It can backfire, but when it hits, the mood is cathartic.

ProjectManager For Sprint Retrospectives

ProjectManager is award-winning work and project management software that can be applied in agile project management, waterfall methodology or a hybrid of both. Our flexible tool helps scrum teams collaborate while sharing real-time data with multiple project views if there’s a department in your organization that prefers the Gantt, sheet, task list or calendar view.

Manage Backlog on Kanban Boards

Our software is collaborative to the core. Scrum teams can manage their backlog on our kanban board after a sprint retrospective. They use the same tool to collaborate on planning the next sprint with what they learned in the retrospective. Managers get visibility into their processes and can reallocate resources as needed to avoid bottlenecks.

Get Real-Time Data for Sprint Retrospectives With Live Dashboards

One way to help with the data gathering of a sprint retrospective is with our real-time dashboard. It doesn’t require set up like other lightweight tools and automatically collects live data. That information is calculated and displayed across colorful graphs that monitor six project metrics. Keep track of time, costs and much more.

Have Greater Insight for Scrum Ceremonies With Filterable Reports

If you need even more detail here are our one-click reports. Each report can be filtered to zero in on only the data you want to track. Then they can be shared with the team during scrum ceremonies or with stakeholders when you meet to update them on the project’s progress.

When working on a sprint, teams can comment and share files. Email notifications and in-app alerts keep you updated and always working on the most current data. Our single source of truth keeps your projective without having to play catchup. At least, that’s one thing you’ll not have to worry about at your next sprint retrospective.

If you’re working in an agile framework with scrum teams and sprints, then you’re constantly in flux and need the anchor of real-time data to help you stay on the right course. ProjectManager is online project management software that has a real-time dashboard and collaborative online Gantt charts to help teams work through their schedules with autonomy. Try it today with this free 30-day trial.