The final event within a sprint is the Sprint Retrospective. Like all other events within the Scrum Framework, the Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity to inspect transparency and to adapt. Unlike other events during which the Scrum artifacts provide the transparency that is inspected, the Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the team to inspect itself and adapt the way it works together.
The key to inspection is transparency, and the Sprint Retrospective places a heavy burden on the Scrum Master to encourage and bring out transparency within the team. When facilitated correctly, the Sprint Retrospective does more than anything else to make a Scrum Team effective. More than any other event, this is when Scrum Masters earn their pay.
The format of the Sprint Retrospective is quite simple. The Scrum Team gathers together to discuss things for up to three hours. That’s it. There are no artifacts to consider, no decisions to be made, no formal process at all. The Scrum Team members just sit around and talk.
The difference between a bad retrospective and a great one is what they talk about. This is where Scrum Masters can make all the difference in the world.
The key to the success of any Scrum event is transparency. The team must inspect transparency to adapt. The challenge with the Sprint Retrospective is that the team must inspect itself. To do this, the team must be transparent with itself.
The job of the Scrum Master is to make the Sprint Retrospective a place where the team can be transparent. Transparency of this kind is risky. The Scrum Master must make the Sprint Retrospective a safe place where honesty and clarity do not lead to bad consequences.
The Three Questions
For those Scrum Masters who are not very skilled or experienced in facilitating sprint retrospectives, there are several suggested strategies that provide rudimentary help. One of them is the three-questions approach.
- 1.
What have you done since the last daily scrum?
- 2.
What do you plan to work on before the next daily scrum?
- 3.
What obstacles or impediments are blocking you?”
- 1.
What should we start doing?
- 2.
What should we continue doing?
- 3.
What should we stop doing?”
These questions can be useful, but what matters is how comfortable the participants are about talking about “safe” things vs. “risky” things. Usually, safe things are easy to talk about, but represent little value. Risky things, however, represent things of great value but are perceived as dangerous to talk about.
When does one talk only about safe things? One does so when one is among strangers or among people who one does not respect or trust. When is it safe to talk about risky things? When one feels the other people in the room are respectable and trustworthy.
The Scrum Master’s task in the Sprint Retrospective is to make it a safe place to talk about risky things. It must be a place where everyone can talk about all of the “elephants in the living room” that everyone knows are there. This requires building trust and mutual respect.
- 1.
Sprint retrospectives are closed-door meetings: The retrospective is a team-building exercise. No one but the team members may be present. If anyone else is in the room, all they will do is dampen any talk of risky things and prevent any discussion of real issues.
- 2.
No written records of discussions are kept: The Sprint Retrospective is a place where participants can speak freely without fear of unintended consequences. It should operate under “Vegas rules”—meaning, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” What happens in the retrospective stays in the retrospective. If some decision or action by the team is to be published after the retrospective is over, the entire Scrum team must agree to do so.
Usually, sprint retrospectives for newly formed teams start out short. Because people haven’t learned to trust each other yet, conversation tends to be limited to safe but inconsequential matters.
In this situation, the Scrum Master can start to build trust by steering the conversation toward feel-good items. A Scrum Master should know about everything that occurred during the sprint and can refer to good things, such as, “Hey, Doug! Didn’t Sierra really come through for you when you were stuck that day? Didn’t she stay late to help you with that tricky problem?” The Scrum Master can then prompt Doug to thank Sierra during the retrospective, which makes both Sierra and Doug feel good, and shows everyone else that the team can recognize and reward people when good things happen.
As the team gets more practice with retrospectives, the Scrum Master can introduce more “edgy” questions, such as: How do you feel about being on this team? Are you proud to be on this team? As team members get more comfortable talking with each other, they can start to address issues in the “risky” category.
Finally there comes a little breakthrough when someone mentions one of the elephants in the room. Often, this is an elephant that is personal. For example, someone might say something like, “Martha, I really admire your skill and talent. I’m not nearly as good as you are, and I know it. I know that everyone else knows it. And I know that you are all laughing at me behind my back. I don’t know if I belong on this team.”
At this point, the Scrum Master must jump in and make sure there is a positive outcome for the team member who was just dangerously transparent. The Scrum Master can do it by saying something like, “What are you talking about? Of course you belong on the team! You don’t have the talent that Martha does, but you never give up. You’re still at it when everyone else has gone home. That has saved us all more than once.”
When the team sees that someone can say something as dangerous as that and have a good outcome, the ice is broken and everyone starts talking about all the things that have been bottled up for so long. That is when the sprint retrospective starts to bump up against the time-box.
After a while, the sprint retrospectives become shorter again because the team members trust and respect each other so much they no longer need the safety of the retrospective to deal with the elephants in the room. When this happens, there is no problem the team can’t solve. Their productivity takes off and they start showing the 1,500% improvement for which Scrum is famous.
Of all the Scrum Framework events, the Sprint Retrospective by far has the most beneficial impact when it is facilitated correctly. It is a shame that so many organizations trying to adopt Scrum do not even bother to hold them.
Summary
The Scrum Framework’s success depends on effective teamwork, and no Scrum event is more important for team building than the Sprint Retrospective. The Sprint Retrospective is the part of the Scrum Framework where Scrum Masters really earn their pay. Their ability to make the “retro” a safe place and to facilitate discussions of sensitive subjects can make the difference between mediocre and superior team performance.
If you put a group of people together and give them a task to do, they will initially be focused on each other and their relationships, rather than the problem at hand. The Scrum Master must lead and guide them through the process of working things out. The Sprint Retrospective is the venue the Scrum Master uses to get team members comfortable with each other. After they can work together based on mutual respect and trust, the sky is the limit to what they can do together.