Purpose Behind the Practice – Retrospective
Ahh, the agile retrospective. I’m not sure I’ve seen a single more unappreciated practice in all my time working in agile environments. I’m also not sure there is a single more valuable practice among all those activities that we typically associate with agile development.
For those of you new to agile, I will give a brief overview of what a retrospective is. The agile retrospective is a period of time that should be set aside at the end of an iteration for the team to reflect on that iteration and look for opportunities to improve their current processes. Those of you familiar with the core agile value of ‘inspect and adapt’ will see instantly why this is such a vital activity. This is where we pause to inspect what we are currently doing and plan to adapt our methods to improve our ability to deliver value to our customer.
There are various techniques that can be used to conduct a retrospective and there is some debate around when exactly the retrospective should be held relative to the iteration. Both topics are beyond the scope of this article, but the main point I would like for you to take away from this is to just have one. Every iteration. Without fail.
Resist the temptation to barrel through your product backlog, heads down, checking off tasks until the product is ‘finished’. The time you take to slow down, get everyone together and have a conversation where your team talks about the issues they are facing and formulates a plan to overcome those issues will pay unimaginable dividends down the road.