Common mistakes during Retrospective Sprint Meetings

Scrum relies upon continuous improvement and adaptation. In a Scrum project, the Retrospect Sprint Meeting is an important element of inspect and adapt Scrum framework. It is the final step of a sprint. All Scrum Team members attend the meeting, which is facilitated or moderated by the Scrum Master. It is recommended, but not required for the Product Owner to attend.

Retrospect Sprint Meeting provides an opportunity to identify best practices, process improvements, and bottlenecks. However, in many cases, teams fail to make complete use of this. During the meeting, Team members identify the things that went well and document the items for future action. However, more often than not, these are forgotten and the team continues to work on the tasks related to next Sprint. Let us learn about some of the common mistakes.

Lack of participation from team members.It is usually not mandatory for the Product Owner to attend the meeting. Presence of Product Owner definitely helps the team in identifying improvement opportunities. If the product owner prefers to attend, he/she should not try to dictate or advocate agenda of these discussions. Some of the improvements might be related to Product owner. In this scenario, team members might prefer not to voice to their opinion.

Pointing fingers at others for mistakes made.It would be a waste of effort and time to figure out the people responsible for the mistake. This should be avoided primarily for two reasons. Firstly, this would not help in finding the solution for the problem and secondly, this would impact the team moral, which can be counter-productive. Team members should focus on

Improper documentation of actionable improvements.Agreed Actionable Improvements are the primary output of the Retrospect Sprint Meeting. They are the list of actionable items that the team has come up with to address problems and improve processes in order to enhance their performance in future Sprints. These actionable items need to be properly documented and each action items needs to be assigned to an appropriate team member. These should also record these in Retrospect Sprint Log. The collection of all Retrospective Sprint Logs becomes the project diary and details project successes, issues, problems, and resolutions. The logs are public documents available to anyone in the organization.

Unfinished action items.Once the Agreed Actionable Improvements have been elaborated and refined, action items to implement the improvements may be considered by the Scrum Team. Each action item needs to have a defined due date for completion. Usually, teams prefer to work on the tasks related to Sprint and neglect the action items discussed during the Retrospect Sprint Meeting. Team members need to be reminded of the action items during the sprint and must be finished before the end of the sprint.

Every organization is different and might face few more issues not discussed in the article. As always, you can make use of these suggestions as per your organization needs.