Agile retrospective: Everything you need to know to stay productive

As more businesses opt for flexibility in their project management, they turn to Agile methods. Keeping an Agile project on track requires a lot of communication between team members, customers, and stakeholders. Each part of the Agile methodology serves its unique purpose and is an important part of keeping a project on track.

The Agile retrospective is no exception. As a way for businesses to reflect on previous work before moving on to the next thing, Agile retrospectives help teams work smarter by encouraging them to learn from their failures and successes.

If you’ve never run a retrospective before, it might seem intimidating — but it doesn’t have to be. In this blog post, we’ll go over exactly what they are, how they can fit into your project strategy, best practices, and how using a platform like monday dev can help you tie it all together.

What is an Agile retrospective?

An Agile retrospective is a meeting at the end of a sprint with the goal of reflecting on successes and failures in the last iteration. The purpose of this is for teams to continue to make projects and workflows more effective for future sprints.

Agile retrospectives provide teams with an opportunity to celebrate wins and smooth over challenges before moving on. It’s also sometimes referred to as a sprint retrospective if you use the scrum framework.

Agile is built on the idea of identifying challenges and correcting them quickly, which is what makes retrospectives so critical.

According to the 17th State of Agile report, 81% of surveyed businesses use retrospectives regularly in their projects. Since retrospectives are a collaborative process, they encourage all team members to share their insights and decide their next steps together.

When do you hold the Agile retrospective meeting?

Agile project management breaks down projects into smaller segments, each with its own deliverable. These segments are called iterations or sprints and typically last around two to four weeks. Each sprint’s goal is to create something useful that can be sent out to users and stakeholders.

Retrospectives should be an integral part of each iteration and added to the timeline during your sprint planning session. They come in at the end of each iteration as the last piece of the Agile puzzle. Your team will come together for an Agile retrospective to reflect on the previous sprint and put initial plans in motion for the next.

Who should attend an Agile retrospective?

Agile retrospectives usually involve all team members who had a part in a sprint. Depending on the makeup of your Agile teams, it may look different from organization to organization. However, there are some key participants that should always be present in an Agile retrospective, such as:

• Development team: Anyone who contributed to development work during an iteration should attend this meeting to provide firsthand insight and constructive feedback about the workflow experience
• Scrum Master: A Scrum Master or manager should facilitate a retrospective meeting and ensure it remains focused and productive while assisting the team in identifying actionable improvements
• Product owner: If your team has a product owner, they should also attend the retrospective to provide their opinions on how well the team met the sprint’s goals and provide feedback from the stakeholder’s perspective

Of course, other team members may attend too, like remote workers, stakeholders, or managers.

Why are Agile retrospectives important?

The retrospective is the last of the practices listed in The Agile Manifesto, yet it is at the heart of what the approach is all about. As the twelfth and final principle in the manifesto, it states that “at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

As a result, retrospectives are a core way teams put the Agile methodology into practice. Without regularly reflecting on the Agile process and how to make it more efficient, it wouldn’t be Agile at all. Aside from this, there are several other benefits Agile retrospectives bring to teams:

• Keeps teams aligned on core project or workflow issues
• Allows for open communication and a space to encourage feedback
• Enables real-time documentation of feedback
• Sets the tone for the next sprint
• Encourages teams to stay flexible and adaptable
• Fosters a mindset of collaborative continuous improvement
• Keeps teams focused on customer success by making changes that benefit the end user

What is the Agile retrospective format?

Following a clear agile retrospective format ensures everyone walks out of the meeting fully understanding what needs to be improved in the next iteration. While people have developed several formats for retrospectives, one of the most popular formats includes five specific steps. Let’s take a closer look at each below including each step’s purpose and some activities or plans you can use to make the most of each stage.

Step 1: Set the stage

Establish the purpose of the meeting and create a safe environment where your team can share detailed feedback. You want to ensure everyone communicates honestly and the meeting doesn’t derail into placing blame. To do this, you can set the tone of the meeting by:

• Reiterating the meeting’s goals
• Starting with warm-up activities like an icebreaker or game to get everyone comfortable
• Establish ground rules for discussion and communication

Step 2: Gather data

Right after your team is warmed up, it’s time to immediately jump into collecting information on what happened during the last sprint, both the good and the bad. You can have everyone share audibly while a moderator or Scrum Master takes note of everything or have your team take a couple of minutes to write down their experiences individually. Some ways you can go about this initial data collection step include:

• Have team members note significant events on a timeline
• Hold a “start, stop, continue” exercise with team members categorizing processes and workflows into each, or use the 4 L’s (what everyone loved, learned, lacked, and longed for) in the last sprint to categorize issues
• Collect feedback anonymously and discuss the topics with the entire team

Step 3: Generate insights

If the previous step was about asking what happened, generating insights is about asking why. Begin to analyze patterns in the data you collected, looking for root causes and key issues. You can accomplish this in a few ways:

• Ask teams to note down why they think each issue is occurring
• Create affinity maps that group similar feedback together to see what patterns emerge
• Use diagrams to try and visualize cause-and-effect and find the root causes of issues

Step 4: Decide what to do

Take your insights and decide collectively what you’re going to do with them for the next sprint. Allow your team to determine what’s most important for their work going into your next iteration and create new processes that replicate the last sprint’s wins and prevent the same problems from popping back up. You can do this in a few ways:

• Team members can vote on the most important issues they want to address
• Form SMART goal to address some of the root issues
• Create a plan with action items and assign each one ownership so they get addressed

Step 5: Close the retrospective

Take the last few minutes to recap your discoveries and action items. Make sure everyone knows which actions they’re responsible for before leaving the meeting. Finally, you should also show your gratitude to each person on your team. Some ways to close out the retrospective include:

• Recapping what went well in the last sprint and what the team will focus on improving in the next
• Showing appreciation for each team member’s contribution by recognizing their efforts
• Summarizing action items and ensuring everyone is clear on their responsibilities

4 Agile retrospective best practices

Agile retrospective meetings can easily get derailed if you’re not careful about time planning and effective management. So that your meeting goes as planned, try and implement the best practices below to ensure you stay focused and productive.

1. Choose someone to facilitate the meeting. While it’s important to keep retrospectives as a collaborative effort, there should always be one person to guide the conversation and keep the meeting on track. This can be the same person each time, or a new facilitator for every retrospective to help introduce new ideas and perspectives
2. Keep retrospectives visual. Your team will respond better when they can watch everyone’s thoughts coming together before their eyes. This can be accomplished with an Agile retrospective template that’s updated in real-time, sticky notes, or a whiteboard
3. Decide on the meeting duration. Set the timeframe ahead of time so everyone knows what to expect. You can choose a specific timeframe or decide to allot 30 minutes per week of the sprint to make it more realistic
4. Make sure you end with action items. Everyone in the room during the retrospective should be clear on what the specific action items were to take into the next meeting. To ensure action items are transparent and available, you can use a management tool like monday dev to ensure documents and notes are easily accessible

Productive Agile retrospectives with monday dev

Using a work tool to organize your retrospectives will not only help meetings run more smoothly but will also ensure that action plans get implemented moving forward. monday dev, a product management platform, helps teams plan projects and products from strategy to launch.

Equipped with plenty of features to support Agile methodologies, monday dev is the perfect sidekick to keep retrospective meetings running smoothly. Here’s a look at some of the most useful features for Agile retrospectives:

• Customizable Agile retrospective template to get started quickly
• Easily assign action items on your board to individual team members
• Gain insights on current sprint progress with robust analytics and reports features and dashboards
• Track and prioritize each action item with categories, statuses, timelines, and more
• View your sprint progress on 27+ different work views such as Calendar, Gantt, Kanban, and more
• Attach documents, files, links, and notes to each item for seamless collaboration
• Integrate 200+ of the most popular work apps like Slack, GitHub, Dropbox, and others
• Build custom automations to create instant notifications on critical action items
• Use monday dev’s AI feature to analyze feedback data and gain insights

With monday dev, you can run more productive retrospective meetings. You’ll have peace of mind knowing that none of your essential meeting data is lost, everything is organized clearly in one place, and your team is able to comb through your sprint backlog and collaborate on action items for your next sprint in real time.

Put your Agile retrospective to work

While it can feel tempting to just get them over with and move on to the next sprint, Agile retrospectives should never be rushed through. They’re a core pillar of the Agile methodology and essential to make each iteration more productive than the next. By implementing a platform like monday dev, not only will you be able to streamline your retrospectives, but you can better attain your sprint goals.