Retrospectiva ÁgilAgile Retrospective

Retrospective is to look back while keep walking.

Is to allowed you to assess past events and recognize the state of what happened: Was it goog? Was it bad? Can we improve?

Retrospective is an opportunity to change, seeking new actions, new ways of doing better.

Retrospective is inspect and adapt. Retrospective is learning.

Retrospective is an act of courage!

"Retrospectives Help teams – even great ones – keep improving" [1].

At the end of projects, processes or iterations is common practice staff meet to discuss the successes and failures that have happened and also discuss what can be done, so that what was a success can be incorporated into the work process in the future and what was a failure that can be construct other forms of action to trial. This is called retrospective meetings.

Agile Retrospectives are those that are carried out in a context of agility, which projects work with short iterations and at the end of each iteration the team meets for a retrospective, seeking to inspect what happened in the duty cycle and adapt their actions to the next iteration.

"Retrospectives allow the learning of the whole team, acting as a catalyst for change and generate new actions."[1].

Retrospectives meeting are always important for learning construction, but agile retrospectives, allow adjustments to be made during the project development increasing the chances of getting better results at the end of the project and providing continuous learning not only as well as continuous improvement on all matters related to the project (eg, design, people, relationships, etc).

Agile Retrospectives are special good with self-organized teams, 7 to 9 members, as it is more easy "during retrospectives, the team discover solutions they can implement without waiting for permission from management" [1].

In Scrum, retrospective is part of the Scrum Process. It is performed at the end of each sprint. The purpose of the retrospective as Scrum Guide [2] is:

Inspect how the last sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process and tools;

Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements; and

Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.

Analyzing the purpose of Scrum Retrospective, we can see that there is a basic structure to conduct the meeting: collect data (identify and sort the main items), generate ideas (list potential improvements) and decide what to do (create a plan for implement improvements). These are the main steps of a retrospective, but a meeting always has one opening and one closing. And according to the image below, we can add these two steps over to a retrospective meeting.

Inspect and Adapt Iteration So, we have:

Openning
Collect data
Generate ideas
Decide what to do
Clossing

These are the steps in the structure that Esther Derby and Diana Larsen presented in their book Agile Retrospective. In subsequent posts I will present each of these steps so that we can discuss better, with more content to better learning.