Chapter 22. The retrospective: working together to improve
All agile methods, whether Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), or custom, support stopping to reflect on the process on a regular basis. A project retrospective normalizes the team on the issues encountered and provides an opportunity for improvement, which everyone desires.
The inherent flaw with retrospectives and postmortems is they often turn into complaint sessions, and participants leave without a clear plan of attack. This chapter provides a process to eliminate these problems.
First, you’ll give participants time to reflect on the project before the retrospective meeting. Second, you’ll collect opinions from the team before the meeting, aggregate the information, and publish the results back to the team to review before the meeting. Finally, you’ll prioritize the issues identified during the retrospective and post them prominently in the team work area.
In this chapter, we’ll follow the Acme Media pilot team as they perform a project retrospective for the first time. This retrospective will be the last step the pilot team performs in testing the new process. When the retrospective is complete, the core team will review all steps of the new process and then decide how to scale the methodology across the rest of the organization.