What is Sprint Retrospective Meeting in Scrum

What is Sprint Retrospective Meeting in Scrum?

7-9 minutes

The Sprint Retrospective occurs after the Sprint Review and prior to the next Sprint Planning . This is at most a three-hour meeting for one-month Sprints . The retrospective session is basically an “improvement” meeting held to find ways and means to identify potential pitfalls, past mistakes, and seek out new ways to avoid those mistakes, which are attended by all – the product owner , scrum master , development team members, and optionally with the stakeholders.

In other words, a sprint retrospective meeting is to find what activities and “things” the team is doing well, what activities should be continued, and what “more” can be done to improve the next Sprint to be more enjoyable or productive. The “inspect” and “adapt” principles play a key role in retrospective session for making the next Sprint more enjoyable or productive.

Sprint Cycle and Ceremonies

Each Sprint start with two planning sessions to define the content of the Sprint: the “What” – Part one of Sprint Planning Meeting and the “How” – Part II of the Sprint Planning Meeting. The combination of these two meeting are also defined as Sprint Planning Meeting.

Sprint Cycle

At the end of the Sprint a Sprint Review Meeting is conducted to allow the Scrum Product Owner to check if all of the committed items are complete and implemented correctly for deployment.

A Sprint Retrospective Meeting is then conducted to check and improve the project execution processes: What was good during the Sprint, what should continue as it is and what should be improved for the next sprints.

5 Steps for Conducting Sprint Retrospective Meeting

Usually retrospectives are a little more sophisticated than that. Most follow the 5 steps:

1. Set the stage – Set the goal; Give people time to “arrive” and get into the right mood
2. Gather data – Help everyone remember; Create a shared pool of information(everybody sees the world differently)
3. Generate insight – Why did things happen the way they did?; Identify patterns; See the big picture
4. Decide what to do – Pick a few issues to work on and create concrete action plans of how you’ll address them
5. Close the retrospective – Clarify follow-up; Appreciations; Clear end; How could the retrospectives improve?

Stages of Sprint Retrospective

Length of Sprint Retrospective Meeting

The thumb rule for the length of a sprint retrospective meeting is that it usually take no more than 45 minutes per week of sprint duration. The following table illustrates this rule:

Total Sprint Duration Sprint Retrospective Duration

• 1 week 45 minutes
• 2 weeks 90 minutes (1.5 hours)
• 3 weeks 135 minutes (2.25 hours)
• 4 weeks 180 minutes (3 hours)

Note That:

The exact length of the sprint retrospective is influenced by factors such as:

• How many people are on the team
• How new the team is?
• Whether any team members are located remotely

Retrospective Meeting Questions

During the Sprint Retrospective, the team discusses:

• What went well in the Sprint?
• What went wrong in the Sprint?
• What We had Learn in the Sprint?
• What should we do differently in the next sprint?