There are a lot of different ways how to do a sprint retrospective meeting, below you can find the one that worked the best for me.
Preparation
- Participants:
- Scrum master
- Team members
- Optional: product owner
- Whiteboard, flipcharts, pencils, post-its, …
- Draw a 2×2 square on the whiteboard (see image below)
- Duration: 2 hours
Moderation
- Agenda, goal, overview (what is this meeting about?)
- Describe how to work with sticky notes
- one information on one sticky note
- write a maximum of 2 sticky notes, then put it on the wall, go back to your place and continue (this helps others to remind what happened during the sprint)
- silence
- Describe the squares on the whiteboard
- smiley face: things you liked or what went good?
- frown face: things you disliked or what went bad?
- flowers: things you appreciate or whom to thank?
- light bulb: ideas that you have or what can be improved/changed?
- 5-10 minutes: team members work on the sticky notes (and puts them on the whiteboard)
- Every team members says a few sentences about their sticky notes
- questions:
- smiley face: how can we repeat it?
- frown face: how can we change it for the future?
- ideas: can we implement it?
- In parallel – create the actions
- add a square on the whiteboard where you write down actions (things that should be changed, improved, repeated and also ideas etc.)
- What can the team change, what must be changed by someone else?
- questions:
- Goal: List of actions that helps the team to grow, list of impediments
Additional information
- Focus on actions and improvements – that’s the real important outcome of the meeting
- Support the team in their process, ask creative questions
- The actions are defined, to do them! If you just write it down, the whole meeting is useless