Sprint Retrospective Meeting

“The facilitator does not intervene directly in the content of a group’s discussions; to do so would be to abandon neutrality and reduce the group’s responsibility for solving its problems.” - Roger Schwarz, The Skilled Facilitator (1994)

An effective facilitator sometimes uses status leveling techniques to reveal a greater cross-section of viewpoints from the team.

  • Safety Check

    • Is not a complete retrospective. If safety is very low, breaking into groups of three or four can be helpful.

  • Focused Conversation Principles

    • Members often begin solving problems by suggesting solutions before agreeing on the problem or its causes – Roger Schwarz

    • ORID

      • Objective Questions (What Happened?)

      • Reflective Questions (How do we feel about it?)

      • Interpretive Questions (What does it mean?)

      • Decision Questions (What are we going to do about it?)

  • Basic Retrospective

  • Classic Scrum Retrospective

    • Actions

      • Move daily Scrum time from 9AM

      • Clarify definition of done

      • Take on less work next Sprint Planning

      • Slice PBIs smaller during Backlog

      • Amend team agreements regarding coding

      • Get quieter pens

  • Silent Writing

  • Timeline Retrospective

    • Scope

      • Sprint

      • Release

      • Team History

  • Decisions

  • The Scrum Master moved for closure, though later Sprints we’d expect the team to rely on her less (as her focus shifts to impediments caused by the outer organization). In either case, the team should write out a few actions to take. For the Team to own their commitment to action, the Scrum Master should ask the Team to do the writing.

Reference