This article examines the Agile myth that constant process improvement is imperative. It discusses the fact that if you need to continuously observe your process, you should wait for the pauses between iteration to perform process improvement.
Improvement is one of the core principle of the Agile Manifesto that states “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”. Retrospectives are a powerful technique to achieve this goal in Scrum and in this blog post, Jonathan Berger proposes seven practices to facilitate retrospectives.
The sprint retrospective in an important moment in the Scrum approach where the team think about its software development process and tries to improve it. As on of the three Scrum roles, the product owner has to play its part in this activity. In this blog post, Roman Pichler explains how product owner can play an active role during the retrospective meetings.
At the end of each sprint, the Scrum team take some time to think about what could be improved in its Agile process. In this blog post, Natalie Warnert discusses how you could also use the retrospective meeting to look at story sizes after the sprint and determine if they were correctly sized as far as story points are concerned.
If you are following an Agile approach to project management like Scrum, you should have adopted a continuous improvement practice. Retrospectives are the name of the meeting when the Scrum team makes a pause to think on how to improve its current. Fun Retrospectives is a book that should help you to animate these meetings.
You have been doing Agile and Scrum for a few years now. With a regular cadence you have retrospectives and a lot of problems and great improvement opportunities are raised but nothing seems to really improve. Stop doing retrospectives!
There are a lot of teams out there who started their transition to agile/lean quite a while ago. Most of them did some great steps in the right direction. But after the first view month, after all of the low hanging fruits were harvested, most of the teams struggle with establishing a valuable and sustaining kaizen culture of continuous improvement using retrospectives.
Scrum Expert Copyright © 2009-2026 Martinig & Associates