The retrospective. The cousin of the “postmortem”. Why not a postmortem? Because our project didn’t die. We want to reflect on what we did right, wrong, how we can improve, what did we learn.
What is the retrospective? I like to have a 15-20 minute section before “review” and “planning” in the Sprint Planning Meeting. Everyone goes around and says what can we do better? What did we do bad? What did I learn? Capture the thoughts and feelings of people and look back at the last retrospective and see what you did this sprint to improve on last sprint.
The hardest part of this “retro” seems to be 2 things, depending on team. Some teams find all the *bad* things and list them out. Some just find all the *good* things and list them out. You need to have a balance. Some things always go better, some worse, so put them out on the table.
If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you are now, or where you are going.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 