Sprint Retrospective: Agenda, Examples & Best Practices

Sprint Retrospective: Agenda, Examples & Best Practices


Retrospection is key to understanding and self-awareness, and is used by agile and scrum teams to monitor their performance and manage their work. Scrum teams work in short durations of one month or less called agile sprints, where a sprint retrospective is held at the end of each sprint. The sprint retrospective is usually held as the last activity of the sprint, and can last for between an hour to three hours. The entire team is present for the sprint retrospective, including the scrum master, the product owner, the development team and everyone who is designing, building and testing the product. The scrum master is the person who is facilitating the process of a sprint retrospective, and they are there to make sure the team is looking at what happened over the last sprint so they can develop new ways to improve performance in the next.
A scrum team is self-organized and can pivot quickly, but without a scrum master to help the team, the pathway towards an improvement process can be slow. To streamline the sprint planning, review and retrospective process, scrum masters use project management software equipped with kanban boards and other task management features. The three main questions asked in a sprint retrospective are what went well during the sprint, what did not go well and what could be improved for better productivity in the next sprint. The sprint retrospective agenda will have an agenda to organize it and keep it on target. Upfront, the goal of the sprint retrospective should be set.

The goal of a sprint retrospective is to gather essential data from everyone present to identify patterns and see the big picture. Before the retrospective ends, the agenda should have a moment in which everyone decides on what the next steps will be. Questions can be asked before the retrospective, during brainstorming/data gathering, and at closure. The project will determine what questions can be posed, and the retrospective should only last about one to three hours to stay on point and not burn out the team.