What technique do you follow for the retrospective meeting?

  • Agile and Scrum
Created on :
December 31, 2018
iZenBridge
Updated on :
January 12, 2023
0 Comments
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The retrospectives are lesson learned meeting held towards the end of a sprint and before the next sprint is started to reflect on the most recent sprint. Its your chance as a team and scrum master to reflect on what worked well and what can be improved.
Because continuous improvement is the backbone of Agile, retrospective have a huge contribution towards successful agile implementation.
Most often, scrum masters are the retrospective facilitators. You can use a number of techniques to get best out of a scrum meeting. A well-coordinated sprint retrospective meeting can increase confidence, trust, and understanding between various stakeholders of the scrum team. Few common techniques used by Scrum team are
  • Asking questions,
  • State your feelings with 1 word,
  • 5 times why (Root Causes) or asking why,
  • Agile Self-assessment Game,
  • Solution focused/strengths and
  • Retrospective of retrospectives.
We asked this question as part of the scrum interview challenge. Out of the 1000+ participants in the first challenge who answered this question, we have selected the best 10 responses after a careful review our Expert Scrum Trainers.

Raghav Julka, Sr. Business Analyst

Zee Media

The 4 L technique is the appropriate approach for the retrospective meeting. The L stands for Like, Learned, Lacked, Longed for. Thoughts are shared in the team for what is Liked by them, what is learned by them, things that they are doing but think can be done even better and something the team desired for or wished.
raghav
linkedin

AKHIL RANGI, Product Manager

AdGlobal360 India Pvt. Ltd.

All stakeholders are present, everyone notes down

 

  1. What went well?
  2. What didn’t went well?
  3. What can we improve?
Then the team can vote on top 3 actions, document the action items with owner and estimate.
Close the meeting with celebration for the successful sprint.
Akhil
linkedin

 


Arjun, Scrum Master

ION Group

Retrospective techniques are chosen based on what team needs to focus on. A few examples are

 

  1. Stop, continue, start: A very used technique for things we should continue, stop doing from next sprint and start doing to improve.
  2. Fast Furious Fed Up: 3Fs are used when the sprint didn’t go really well and team wants to get off things and improve on some.
  3. Learnt, Lagged, Longed, Loved: A different technique which can be used in a mixed sprint where there are some success and some failures.
  4. Lean Coffee: Used to discuss top priority pain areas and identify action items for them.
  5. Root cause Analysis: This can be used when we want to analyze the Root Cause of a particular problem which we want to address.
  6. Hot Air Balloon: A different technique which sums up what could be learnt from the previous sprint and what could be done for the future sprints.
  7. This Guy and That Guy.: A technique that helps team identifies the qualities that they want each team member to work upon so that they become a successful team. Try to introduce new techniques that focuses on to bring out current problems of team and team enjoys the different theme of the meeting as well.
Arjun
linkedin

Jyoti Saluja, DI (Direction Industrielle)

Sopra Steria

The Scrum team along with Product Owner and Scrum Master participate in Retrospective meetings. We use co-design technique of individual ideation and brainstorming wherein everyone ideates individually first and writes ‘what went well’, ‘what didn’t go well’ and ‘what can be improved’ on separate post-its. Everyone (in a round-robin fashion) quickly presents ‘‘What went well’. Then, we move to ‘What didn’t go well’ and brainstorm what can be done to improve the current state. Then, Whatever is left in ‘What can be improved’ is picked up for discussion.
Additionally, as ScrumMaster, I like to come prepared with some data eg, testing defects density, sprint goal met or not and velocity trends. And discuss improvement actions.At times, we use multi-voting technique to agree on actions.
The key thing is to pay attention & respect to everyone’s inputs.

Sujit Pathak, Strategic Test Lead

 

Ideally retrospect means for team is to look back at past events, hence this is used to identify the areas that need improvement as well as celebrate the success that is achieved. So, I organize this meeting, I gather lots of relevant data, I focus on the facts and insights. We in meeting along with retrospect discussion, create Action plan for the improvement and adoption of improvement. Then I wrap up the meeting.
Sujit
linkedin

Naveen Vaddireddy, Scrum master

Allstate solutions

Whatever the technique is, intention is one. Inspect and adopt, try to learn something from the deeds. For gathering information from team there are various techniques that can be followed. Identify a gamified technique for your team to get better results based on people, culture and mindset.
Set the stage to have a happy, healthy and safe environment, use your gamified/interesting technique to gather the data, brainstorm the information available and generate insights out of it, finally implement the consensus building technique to come up with action items.
Now you know what you have to carry forward, what we have to rectify, work them accordingly. Happy PDCA cycle.
Naveen
linkedin

Karun Aarya

Various techniques :

 

  1. Went well, what can improve, actions
  2. Start, stop, continue
  3. mad, sad, glad
  4. Starfish
  5. Six thinking hats

Sai krishna Akundi, Test Manager

 

he technique we follow is to walk through the HPD Jira item (internal notation of the feature/story) completed for that sprint by the respective Team pod member. Along with PO, Stakeholders and Senior mgmt will review and suggest if any changes/Approves them.(abbreviation: Healthipass prod dev(HPD))
Sai-Krishna
linkedin

 


Subramanya

 

Post-It’s with What worked and What did not work, followed by categorization and brainstorming on them. Finally get commitment on what we will experiment next sprint

Ashish Agarwal, Scrum Master

 

Intent of Retrospective meeting is to get things from team which can help them improve. We use different games like Learning Matrix, Plus-Delta, Team Craft, SaMoLo+ etc based on how sprint went and what things need to be brought up.

 

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We have published all the 3 blogs of Level 1 :

  1. What technique do you follow for the retrospective meeting?
  2. What is the Difference between Traditional Project Manager and Scrum Master?
  3. How do you measure the story points? Provide examples.

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