Agile at Work: Getting Better with Agile Retrospectives

Designed to help increase the pace and quality of a team’s work, agile retrospectives utilize a structured format to gather insights, identify challenges, create a more agile mindset, and make a team more productive and successful. Author Doug Rose outlines the five phases of a successful retrospective: setting the right direction, getting all the issues on the table, gathering insights from the team, making decisions, and applying changes. He describes how to use a starfish diagram or PANCAKE approach to facilitate a comfortable and effective retrospective, and finally, discusses the importance of closing a retrospective with clear action items for the next sprint.

Learning objectives
Five phases of retrospectives
Choosing an ideal meeting space
Identifying issues and improvements
Working with a distributed team
Encouraging discussions
Setting goals using SMART criteria
Asking good questions
Making team decisions
Closing out an agile retrospective