Questions tagged [retrospective]
Retrospective is a meeting held by a project team at the end of a project iteration of its inspect-and-adapt or continuous improvement process. Use `sprint-retrospective` instead for Scrum-specific retrospectives. Do NOT use this tag for questions about postmortems; use the `postmortem` tag instead.
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Should I ask my boss not to come to retrospectives?
I am a Scrum Master for a small team (8 devs). I have been having trouble getting engagement from many of the team members, especially the junior team members. My boss missed two retrospectives ...
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Manager no longer invited to the retrospectives
A colleague of mine is a working manager on a software development team. The scrum master has uninvited him permanently from the retrospectives. (So far for 3 sprints running.)
From my Scrum ...
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How can a team member moderate a retrospective?
In my organization, we decided to hold retrospectives. To be honest, this was a move facilitated by me, because I felt that we should improve our teamwork after a rise from two members in one office ...
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How do I facilitate a first time Agile retrospective?
I have never facilitated a retrospective before and I have been asked to facilitate one on Tuesday. I have ordered a book which is arriving tomorrow and I have been checking out various websites.
I ...
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Should Product Owner be present on all retrospectives?
As a scrum master I will join new development team.
Some additional information about environment:
The team works iteratively, but they don't do any retrospectives,
Previous scrum master (I'd ...
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Product Owner is requesting a "confidence check" for reaching the MVP - How to in a Scrum project?
We're in a quite complex software engineering project with lots of unknowns due to new technologies involved that the Team has never applied nor have comparable experience.
Due to these risks the ...
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Is it a good idea to show a 'story points by developer' graph at retrospectives?
I am part of an agile team in a large organisation. At our fortnightly retrospective a graph is shown of how many story points each developer has completed over the course of the fortnight.
We are not ...
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Planning a quick retrospective
If we had a semi-crummy sprint with low velocity and little to show for it and don't want to inundate ourselves with scrum-related overhead, fully cognizant that something not-right happened, with ...
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Quicker Retrospectives? They are taking longer and are less effective now we are working from home because of COVID
I am after ideas to make things run more smoothly and more quickly.
I have been using a combination of MS Teams and online tools like GroupMap and Stormz.
But there are long pauses, and less to and ...
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How should we implement items from Sprint Retrospectives?
Every two weeks we have our Scrum retrospective meeting and everything seems to be great, because we are getting lots of ideas. However, the problem is that these ideas are almost never actually ...
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What is the difference between facilitating a retrospective and leading one?
I have been asked to facilitate a retrospective but I was specifically told not to lead the retrospective.
What is the difference between leading a retrospective and facilitating a retrospective and ...
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Is gauging a team's performance using scores assigned by other stakeholders valuable?
We have a new way of gauging teams.
All the individuals involved (business owners, managers, stakeholders) except the team itself gauge how they felt the team did using a score. If the score is ...
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How to encourage more participation in web scrum meetings?
I have recently become scrum master for an established team that has been doing many parts of Scrum, but has not had a scrum master. The team is great team who does well and I have been trying hard to ...
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What are the right conclusions to draw from the success or failure of a Sprint?
I recently encountered the opinion that, if a Sprint is successful due to statistical reasons (e.g. the team made big mistakes during planning but the team delivered its stories anyway), then that's ...
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How to capture and document sprint retrospective results
My question: Is there
a recommended format or
a procedure or
a check list
for documenting the sprint retrospective? Not only the immediate outcomes (i.e. measures to be tried in the next sprint), ...
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Should a Product Owner be present for all retrospectives?
We have a Scrum Team of a Product Owner and four developers (one of whom is Scrum Master), running one week sprints. As per Scrumguides.org (emphasis mine):
The Sprint Retrospective is an ...
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How do you make the Teams Retrospective Actions visible and ensure they get attention throughout the Sprint?
After a Retro we usually have 2 or 3 Actions to address in the next Sprint. Some of these Actions are sometimes more of a reminder to Developers.
Who do we ensure they are addressed in Sprint?
We're ...
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4
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How often and when should you change WIP limits?
I'm testing out Kanban on my research team and I think we're okay for now. We've visualized our workflow and set limits to the tasks. I'm using Kanban in Action for reference. I've set an initial WIP ...
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Daily Standup, Demo, Retrospective - Mandatory? How?
I've got a bit of an involved question, here. (Apologies if I provided too much unnecessary explanation; if so just skip to 'The Problem'.) First, let me explain...
The Situation:
We're a middling-...
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How to manage a situation when one team member doesn't want to participate in retrospectives?
Team works together for couple of months. They are somewhere between norming and performing phase. All team members are enthusiastic about their work and the product they work on.
One of team members ...
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2
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What do you mean by inspect relationships during sprint retrospective
One of the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to: "inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools".
What mean relationships?
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What is meant by "inspect people" in Scrum retrospective guide?
Scrum Guide tells us to inspect people at retrospectives: http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events-retro
Inspect how the last Sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, ...
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Making Retrospectives Effective in a Long-Running Project
I'm a ScrumMaster for a software firm, and we have a project that is entering its 35th Sprint. While I appreciate the value of Retrospectives, it's becoming progressively more difficult to get good ...
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Is is right if a team member moans about a 'bad performance' in retrospective?
Is is right if a team member moans about a 'bad performance' of another team member in retrospective? In my understanding, teams will always look at the team performance, never on a single members ...
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6
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How should we implement and keep track of recurring or intangible retrospective action items?
Our Product/Tech team has been transitioning towards Agile project management in the last year or so, and we hold daily standups, weekly planning meetings and biweekly retrospective meetings. We also ...
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What should a team do in the Sprint Retrospective when everything is going well?
I'm currently helping out a team in the role of Scrum Master. Everything is running smoothly. The last couple of retros we had very little to talk about, and if there were issues we mostly agreed upon ...
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2
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How can I organize a more engaging Sprint Retrospective?
I'm going to be organizing the retro (Scrum) and I would like to get more experience on it. I have assisted to some and have organized some as well, but the format always seems to be
| What went ...
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5
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What are effective techniques for conducting retrospectives for a geographically-distributed team?
Our team is distributed across two cities in EST and one city in PST. We heavily use Hangouts, Google Docs and other collaboration tools.
Most advice and techniques for conducting retrospectives are ...
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No retrospectives in software company - Is this a bad sign?
I know of one software company that does not have sprint retrospectives or retros of any kind. They had it in the past but cancelled them. Is there ever a good reason for not having retrospectives or ...
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As a Scrum Master, how to speak to a developer about his delays?
What would be the right approach to have as a Scrum Master to speak to a developer about him being late in the office everyday (we show up between 9:30 and 10 in the morning, it is not a clear rule ...
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5
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"Dead horse" topics banned at sprint retrospectives, is this good practice - why or why not?
I'm asking as a member of an Agile (Scrum) team, not as the PM/PO/Scrum Master.
On this project there are a handful of well-known impediments / problems / things that didn't go well, which are a ...
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Team needs a lot of time to deliver even the simplest stories- how to know why?
So, the problem, from the management perspective is that a Scrum Team delivers only the simplest stories within the whole Sprint. Literally, changing a button takes two weeks. The Team estimates ...
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Toxic Retrospective in Agile Development
On my Team, we do a Retrospective after every Sprint. Usually it's very productive, and the Team discusses what went well, what could improve, and what action items we want to take from the meeting. ...
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2
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Retrospectives with fewer "games"
After the first few retrospectives with a five-step structure and activities found at Retromat, I got the feedback that there's too much "playing", writing notes and post-its, rather than simply ...
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Carrying items over from one sprint to the next
Question: Carrying items over from one sprint to the next
Answer: Yes
Scenario: I am a new scrum master on a team and we have just completed our first sprint. I was not here when the team planned ...
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Scrum Retrospective during holiday season
The question in short: how should we handle a scrum retrospective when the capacity of the team has been very low?
Background
We have a team of 6 people: 1 PO, 4 developers (of whom 1 part-time on ...
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5
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What is a good plan for a retrospective to show its purpose?
Background & assumptions:
the team has 4 developers + team lead
some of them participated in retrospective meeting before, some didn't
the team would like to start doing retrospectives and asked ...
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Retrospective: difference between gathering data and generating insights?
I am reading a book called Agile Retrospectives and the author suggests splitting retro's into 4 stages. Two of the stages seem so similar:
Gathering Data and Gathering insights, seem the same as I ...
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4
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How to faciliate a retrospective for a group of Product Owners
I need to faciliate a retrospective for a bunch of product owners. I have a couple of ideas of how to run it but I would really like to get some input and ideas.
Each product owner who is attending ...
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Agile Retrospective: Comments Anonymous?
In Agile Scrum Retrospective boards, what is the best practice?
Should Teammembers put their Name by each comment? I heard it was supposed to be more Anonymous based when documenting, at least for my ...
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Should issues with individuals be called out in retrospectives?
A developer has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to co-operate with the team in a few ways: being passive aggressive, sometimes not creating stories/tasks for the work he is actively doing, ...
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Retrospective - too many small and random problems. Death by a thousand needles
After reading some literature about retrospective and actions it is not clear to me what to do if team faces big variety of random and small issues during sprint, and these problems do not occur often....
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How to make a retrospective focus on certain issues which I have already identified
My team has certain issues which I have already determined, namely:
They are not pairing enough
Their cycle time is very high
They break timeboxed tasks
The team is not splitting QA work equally, ...
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Large group retrospective format
I would like to run a retrospective for a huge amount of people involved in a cross-departmental project.
The problem is there are 50 people involved.
I was thinking of doing the data gathering, ...
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Is retrospective a good place check the status previous retrospective action items?
Is retrospective a good place check the status previous retrospective action items?
In my team we identify action items every retrospective; however I am not sure whether we should review them during ...
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How to best conduct and document agile retrospective meetings?
I have worked in organisations that used either one of the following approaches during a retrospective meeting to gather feedback and reflect on how the agile team is doing and to explore ways to ...
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What is a good format for Sprint retrospectives?
We are doing Sprint retrospectives with the entire team including the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner present. We have constructive discussion and good ideas are being generated. However, to improve ...
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Why are sticky notes used in sprint retrospective meetings?
Some of my team members wanted to email their feedback for sprint retrospective meetings instead of gathering in a room and write down their feedback in a sticky note. Other than telling them that ...
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Using Retrospectives to Influence Process
I've been encouraging my current team to adopt process and workflow changes to be more agile. We have our first retrospective coming up and I'm looking for some advice on how to conduct the ...
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3
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Should all teams hold the same sprint retrospective?
I am the SM for two teams of 9 totalling 18 people and 20 including SM and PO.
Half the team is at offshore so we are using Web conferences for our meetings.
So my question is, should we hold ...
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