Sprint retrospectives offer us an opportunity to inspect and adapt our process. By reflecting on the Sprint you just finished, you are able to learn about your processes, and how to improve them in future Sprints. While you conduct the Sprint retrospective, create a list of desired improvements and decide which specific improvements you will implement and when, being mindful that not all process improvements may be possible to implement all at once. Empirical process control and continuous process improvement is one of the key principals of Scrum, which you should leverage as part of every Sprint retrospective.

What

A Sprint retrospective is a good project management practice, dedicated to reviewing a completed Sprint and learning from both the successes and the failures so the team and organization can continuously improve.

Why

You’ll learn best from an organized and methodical reflection on your project experience. As such, the Sprint retrospective is an important mechanism for harvesting the newly gained wisdom so you can turn what you learned into tangible changes for future Sprints.

How

The entire Scrum team should participate in this retrospective, and it should be facilitated by the Scrum Master. It’s important not to skip or rush through this important meeting. Start by reviewing the project goals, timeline, budget, major events, and success metrics. Then discuss what worked well and what didn’t and identify specific ways to improve future work. The goal is to come up with useful strategies that everyone can agree on for future project implementations. The Scrum Master should set the expectation that the retrospective is “blameless”- meaning that this meeting is about sharing insights and learning and not about placing blame, venting, or working out interpersonal issues. This is an important guiding principle to enable open and honest feedback during the retrospective.