Short for “retrospective,” a retro is a team gathering following every sprint. It is a time to reflect on how we do what we do each week and think of ways we might improve. This could be not only involve technical processes, but also number of meetings or team dynamics.

All retros should begin with a reminder of the Prime Directive:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Retrospectives should be facilitated by someone from outside of your team. This gives an unbiased person the ability to keep everyone on task and promote a safe environment for discussion.

A good retro, in addition to reviewing the Prime Directive, will also begin with a quick safety check. In some anonymous form (such as scraps of paper handed to the facilitator), each person will vote how safe they feel in a range of 1 (completely uncomfortable sharing thoughts and opinions) to 5 (no problem speaking my mind).

If there are any votes that are 2 or less, the retro stops and the team reviews ideas of what might be causing a person to feel unsafe (even if it is not themselves). Some ideas you may encounter include unfamiliar people in the room (such as observers or brand new team members), or past experience of not feeling heard. The team then discusses what it might take to make it a safe environment (which sometimes leads to excusing someone from the retro) and eventually revotes for the safety check.

If there are any safety votes that are 3’s, it’s good to remind everybody to be sensitive to how they are treating the comments of others as well as being considerate in their own comments, as some people may not be completely comfortable. The meeting will generally still proceed.

Once the team makes it through the safety check, there are generally 3 categories that the facilitator will ask for input on:

• What went well?
• What could be better?
• Questions?

Each team member will be able to add notes to each category with their thoughts. This is generally done somewhat anonymously, whether sticky notes handed to the facilitator to place on the board or using a retro web application, such as Fun Retro. Once all ideas are posted, the team reviews all ideas in each category, making sure they understand each one.

The facilitator then determines which ideas in the “What could be better” and “Questions” categories are the most important to discuss in the time remaining. Generally speaking, each team member gets 3 votes and marks what s/he wants to talk about, and discussion starts at the topic with the most votes.

As discussion ensues, action items are noted and people assigned to follow through by the next retro at the end of the next sprint.

These regular retros help a team to constantly improve their ability to work together efficiently and effectively.