Why we need Agile Retrospective?

Retrospective was designed to address Twelfth Agile Principle, which states: "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly." 
 

Prime directive

“Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone does the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” 

Purpose of Retrospective

Using Retrospective :

• we focus on learning and understanding instead of blaming 
• we should find the root cause of the problem vs. just finding the symptom 
• we Inspect in past and do the changes in FUTURE to get adapt according to our environment.
• we are improving our future work.
• we are extending the usefulness of current and future activities.
• team understands what went wrong together so they can change their way towards betterment.

What Agile Retrospective is not

• History Lesson learnt 
• Hot air (Blame Game)
• transform into complaint sessions: (People do not complain with bad intentions. They simply exteriorise what is affecting them. They have needs that are not being fulfilled and they need to express their emotions. Problems occur when the receiver is put off by the complaint and immediately enters defensive mode and counterattacks. )
• Change the world 
• Wishful thinking
• Ideas fest
• After action review 
• Postmortem  
• Project Review

Structure of a Retrospective 

• Set the stage ( What you can expect to get out of this exercise and choose right style for facilitation.)
• Gather data ( What )
• Generate insights ( So What )
• Decide what to do ( Now What)
• Close the retrospective ( Action Items)

Thanks

Manisha