Dedicating Time to Process Improvements

The retrospective is a time dedicated to evaluating the sprint and finding ways to make improvements. It allows you the opportunity to look at all of your processes from backlog refinement to sprint planning to managing sprint tasks.

As discussed in a previous section, one way of evaluating your processes is to document the activities that you should start, stop, and continue. These activities can be anything from starting to pay more attention in daily scrum meetings to stopping taking on new work during the sprint. Once the team agrees to that start, stops, and continues, you should post them, so that the team keeps them top of mind as they begin working on the next sprint. The scrum master and team should keep each other accountable to the new standards.

At the end of each sprint, the team should look at whether new approaches implemented after discussion in previous retrospectives have resolved issues or if you need to come up with new approaches.

For instance, did you agree to stop cancelling the daily standup to allow more time for other work tasks, and yet, daily standups are still being cancelled? Perhaps the team should talk about what they can do to put the focus back on the standups. Can they move the meeting earlier in the day, so that it doesn’t disrupt the flow of work? Would the team like to have a little more time in the morning to get started on tasks before taking a break to sync up with the team?

The team is dynamic, so activities that you identified previously as ones that you need to start or stop may no longer apply. However, you can (and should) still look at these activities to determine which ones apply and how to best implement improvements to team processes.