Retrospecting Your Iterations

Agile teams bookend their work with an Iteration Planning meeting at the beginning and an Iteration Demo and Review meeting at the end. This latter meeting highlights the accepted done items in the iteration, the metrics that show what occurred in accepting (or not accepting) items, and what the impact of these may have on backlog priorities.

But there is more "Inspect and Adapt" to be considered at the end of an iteration beyond the Demo and Review. Teams also engage in Retrospection. This learning practice is specific to the team; it does not involve the Stakeholders or other attendees of the Demo and Review meeting.

So, what is the difference? To quote Diana Larsen and Esther Derby from their book Agile Retrospections: "When we say retrospective, here's what we have in mind: a special meeting where the team gathers after completing an increment of work to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork. Retrospectives enable whole-team learning, act as catalysts for change, and generate action. Retrospectives go beyond checklist project audits or perfunctory project closeouts. And, in contrast to traditional postmortems or project reviews, retrospectives focus not only on the development process, but on the team and team issues. And team issues are as challenging as technical issues---if not more so."

Setting up a Trustful Retrospective Environment

A good retrospective relies on an environment in which team members are able to speak truthfully without ongoing recriminations. To that end, the ScrumMaster facilitates the meeting to ensure that this all members participate openly. A good basic approach to gathering insights is to have each member respond in a Round Robin fashion. That is, each member in turn provides a response to the question or says "Pass." This continues in a circular, one person at a time, fashion until there are no additional responses. If safety is a factor, responses can be gathered anonymously. If trust is not high, the retrospective may simply focus on trust as a theme and resolve to embrace new practices that increase trust.

Retrospection Techniques

ScrumMasters can consider a few options as guidelines for facilitating the meeting. They go beyond "What worked well/What didn't work well?" in helping teams gather insights about their practices and make new team agreements:

1. ORID — Engage the team in a series of questions that help slow down decisions and ferret out many insights before moving to recommendations:
   1. O - ask Objective questions first. "What was happening? What did you notice?" This is often referred to as the "WHAT". Have team members brainstorm in small groups to gather these items.
   2. R - ask Reflective questions next. "What reaction did you have to that? What was challenging or helpful?" These are the "GUT" reactions team members now bring forth.
   3. I - now ask Interpretive questions. You are getting to the "SO WHAT": "What does that say about how we work? What might be some recommendations for our work?"
   4. D - and finally, you are ready to ask Decisional questions. This is the "NOW WHAT": "Given what we have brought out here, what new agreements or practices might we invite into our next iteration(s)?"
2. Helped/Hindered/Hypothesis — "The 3 H's"--- Ask each of these questions one by one and have the team call out items to be scribed on a flipchart, one flipchart per question:
   1. What helped us in this iteration?
   2. What hindered us in this iteration?
   3. What hypotheses (recommendations) could we make about how we work in our next iteration?
3. Wind versus Anchors —  "What put wind in our sails during this iteration versus What weighed us down?"  Use a flipchart for each question.  Be sure that you get all the positive "Wind" responses before moving to the "Anchor" responses. These should lead to open discussion about recommendations going forward.
4. Appreciations — An iteration retrospective is a great time to invite individual team members to appreciate other individual team members: "Sue, I appreciate you for helping me with testing on the final story." We always respond, "Thank you," when someone appreciates us! Whatever retrospection technique you choose, remember that the goal is to have the team make decisions. At the end of a retrospective, the ScrumMaster guides the team in selecting one to three new practices to adopt for the next iteration based on their insights. In this way, the team is in essence continually creating new, ever-improving working agreements; it commits to continually improving its Agile adoption, its trust, its safety, and its value delivery.

Once the retrospection is over, the ScrumMaster collects Action Items and ensures each has an owner from the team. The ScrumMaster then takes on the ownership of ensuring each Action Item is completed.