“If you adopt only one #agile practice, let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow.”

Woody Zuill – Agile Coach.

This is a very important space in Agile because is where we acknowledge continuous improvement and learning as a TEAM.

We do a Retrospective Meeting, preferably every time we finish a sprint or iteration.

Why?

Because we can gather information from all the product’s cycle. Maybe if we do the retrospective on a time frequency, we wouldn’t have the chance to evaluate everything and we may lose attention to important things.

How to do a good Retrospective Meeting?

1. Prepare the space: Schedule time and activities for a deeper conversation as a team.

2. Gather Data: Do a game or dynamic for the team to easily remember what went wrong or what could be better next time.

3. Inquire: When you get the data, try to go deeper. Identify the root of the obstacles or problems.

4. Decide what to do: We can find 45 things to improve, and we eventually will, but we have to start somewhere. Decide which activities or improvements are a priority, thinking always about what brings more value to the team.

5. Close the retrospective: Ask the team how are we leaving the space? How significant were the conversations we had? How valuable was this exercise? How productive the team sees this space? and How could we do better retrospectives in the future?

Here, I share with you some tools or platforms to create a good retrospective:

Retromat – Inspiration & plans for (agile) retrospectives

Improve your team with fun sprint retrospectives | EasyRetro former FunRetro

The Visual Collaboration Platform for Every Team | Miro

MURAL is a digital-first visual collaboration platform

The one that I found most interesting for Retrospectives, was Retromat. I think it helps us save time and energy looking for activities, this way we can focus on which activity would fit better for our team specifically rather than thinking about what to do in the meeting.

How long ago was our last retrospective session? How long are we waiting for the next one?

These retrospective exercises are thought for development teams, but Agile Principles work as well for other companies or teams. Apply this practice to your business and especially to your team, and watch the improvement get ahead.

Please, leave in the comments your opinion about implementing this Retrospective practice in your business.

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Thank you, have a great day.