Mike Lyons walks through the Sprint retrospective, where the Scrum Master, Product Owner, and dev team spend an hour asking what went well, what didn't, and what to fix next. The video covers the standard three-question format and shows a variant called the wedding retro that uses something old, new, borrowed, and blue.
The Sprint retrospective. Another one of our ceremonies in the Scrum three, five, three and hey, don't tell the other ceremonies, but this is my favorite one. Sometimes I'll meet teams like no kidding, I'll meet teams that will say, well, we used to do retrospectives, but they got kind of boring and they got kind of, you know, complacent in doing retrospectives. Let me tell you why I think it's the most important piece. The key reason is because it reflects back on the Agile Manifesto principle of at regular intervals the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. So what is this thing? The Sprint retrospective. It's a time for the team to look back at how they delivered as a team. If the Sprint review was the what we delivered the Sprint retrospective, is that how we delivered the Sprint retrospective is really just family time. It's for the Scrum Master product owner team members. It's just for the Scrum team. You don't want to have managers or supervisors there. Again, we're not doing status, we're reflecting and, and looking at ways to get better. It's probably the last ceremony you have each sprint and typically will be time boxed to one to two hours with a preference for the one hour mark. And oftentimes is facilitated by asking a set of three questions. What went well, what didn't go so well? And what concrete action are we going to put in the backlog to improve next Sprint? I like to recommend teams have at least one making more, but at least one action actionable story that we're going to do in the next Sprint to improve our daily workings as a team. Some guidelines for better Sprint retrospectives include things like for product owners, make sure you're present, make this priority and be willing to prioritize improvement work in the next Sprint team members review plans from previous retrospectives. This is always a good first step in your retrospective agenda. Review previous retrospective action items, identify items that went well and areas for improvement. Be vocal and willing to be transparent with each other. And then lastly, be willing to create a plan for improvement. Scrum Masters, you're going to facilitate this event. You're going to assist people in creating that plan for improvement. And of course participate because Scrum Masters are going to have great ideas for improvements and sort of having a view into how things can go better. Now there's many different techniques for this. The key takeaway is that you schedule it and you have it every sprint. But another technique that I like and used just recently is called the wedding retro. Let me talk about that real quick. So we cover something old, positive feedback or constructive criticism on an established practice. Something new, positive feedback or constructive criticism on experiments that we're running. Something borrowed, a tool or idea from another team, maybe the Internet or even yourself, as you want to experiment, a potential experiment. And something blue. Any blocker or source of sadness. There's a ton of different techniques for running the retro, but it is the key event, the key ceremony for relentlessly improving as a team. The Sprint retrograde.
