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 their processes and what qualities they have that make them great.

What's the setup?

Agile Scrum retrospectives - recipe retro example

Draw 3 areas on the whiteboard with the following headings, as per example above:

Ingredients – What ingredients do we have that makes us a great team?

Method – What processes do we follow that allow us to delivery consistently?

Reviews – What’s good / bad?

Instructions

Ask the team to think about each category and create post-it notes, once everyone has finished creating items then ask each person to bring them up to the board and explain each one to the team, let the team discussion flow and capture any actions from this.

Once everyone has been, review the actions and assign owners to help drive them forward.