The importance of having time to reflect back on the previous sprint is easy to see for any agile scrum team, it’s a time to acknowledge the good things the team have been doing and should continue doing, but also to highlight and discuss anything that the team feels has not gone so well. It is also an opportunity for the team to look at ways to improve or change the way in which they work in the coming sprints.

It's really important to have some achievable actions come out of the retrospective, this can be done by keeping the session focused and relevant, it can become all too easy for retrospectives to end up being a moaning session where nothing good or positive comes from them as a result.

Purpose

The purpose of this retrospective is to get the team to think about how the scrum events are run, if they add value to the way we work and what could we do better going forward.

What's the setup?

Draw the scrum events on the whiteboard to set the retrospective up.

Agile Scrum retrospectives - rate of scrum events retro example

1) Ask everyone to think about the scrum events over the last 1 or 2 sprints and think of the following:

  • Did you find it valuable?
  • What was the best thing about it?
  • What would you do differently next time?
  • What rating out of 5 (1 being poor, 5 being amazing) would you give it and why?

2) Once everyone has finished collecting thoughts ask each person individually to share with the rest of the team.

3) Collect any actions as discussion within the team happens.

4) Review Actions and assign owners to carry forward.

Here are some pictures of when our team ran this retrospective:

Agile Scrum retrospectives - rate of scrum events retro example