Retrospection- After the Sprint Review, the Development Team holds an internal meeting to review the Sprint and use it to improve the process (lessons learned) in the next Sprint.

Also, find out what's not working and use the time to find creative solutions and develop an action plan. Scrum Master facilitates this meeting. We generally use sticky notes in which each team member writes three things about sprint (which just got over.)

1. What shall we continue?
2. What needs to be stopped?
3. What needs to be started?

Then the Team looks for underlying causes and agrees on one improvement for the following sprint with acceptance tests built in, along with a commitment to review the results at the next Sprint Retrospective.

Over the course of time, some Scrum practices begin to slip, or the meeting has become perfunctory, not effective.  Let’s look at how you got here through the frame of the usual suspects for an ineffective Retrospective.

The Usual Suspects are:

The whole team thinks it’s a waste of time.

If this is the case then ask the team why it is a waste of time? More likely the meeting is not managed effectively and the outcome of the meeting doesn’t lead to change in the action plan. Set the agenda of the meeting before it starts, and work towards it collectively.

Retrospectives aren’t valuable since we don’t have any impediments.

According to me, this is the biggest impediment like fear of conflict or lack of trust on team members.

 The Retrospective is just too hard.

Some team impediments are big.  Too big to solve in one meeting.  It’s important to make meaningful progress and keep the momentum going each Sprint, and this is most easily done by breaking down issues into something that can be ACCOMPLISHED and has a clear definition of done.

We do it but it doesn’t have an impact.

Scrum is there to help the team to deliver the products at a faster rate with a steady increase in velocity but if the flat-lined means retrospections are not able to find the root cause of it.

If the above conversations are true then the corrective actions need to be taken.

Adopt a new practice to REJUVENATE your Retrospectives.  Sometimes it’s as easy as changing the way the question is ASKED and the Happiness Metric is a great way to do that.  

The Happiness Metric is a simple tool used to FOCUS your Retrospective and collect actionable information.  It works like this:

Ask each Team member:

1. On a scale of 1-5, how happy are you with your role in the company?
2. On the same scale, how happy are you with the company?
3. What specifically increased your happiness last Sprint?
4. What specifically decreased your happiness last Sprint?
5. What would increase your happiness for the next Sprint?

By FOCUSING on your retrospective, you will increase velocity, finish early and accelerate faster. Try it, if it doesn’t work there will always be the next sprint.

Continuous improvement is what sustains and drives development within an agile team, and retrospectives are a key part of that.