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What Is A Sprint Retrospective Meeting? This Might Surprise You!

The goal of the Sprint Retrospective Meetings is to improve the teamwork of Scrum Team members and the application of the Scrum process.

The Sprint Retrospective Meeting happens directly after the Sprint Review Meeting (See more about Scrum Sprint Retrospective Meetings - Goals and Best Practices), and it closes the Sprint.

Therefore, Sprint Retrospective Meetings lead to an increase in productivity, the performance of Scrum Team members, and the quality of engineered software.

The Sprint Retrospective is an integral part of the “inspect and adapt” process. Without this meeting, the Scrum Team will never be able to improve its overall throughput, and they cannot focus on the improvement of team performance.

Remember this: What you focus on is what becomes better!

A Sprint Retrospective is a regular opportunity to identify improvements and remove process-related obstacles. It is timeboxed to at most three hours for a one-month Sprint, and usually less for a shorter Sprint. Some examples of such opportunities for improvement that we frequently see in our projects are:

• Adoption of agile software development practices such as extreme programming (XP) or test-driven development (TDD),
• Identification of new team norms and principles, or
• Increased availability of the Scrum Product Owner.

Without exception, the Scrum team conducts Sprint Retrospective Meetings at the end of every Sprint.

These regular meetings enable the Scrum Team to systematically adapt and improve their use of the Scrum process to the specifics of their project.