Sprint Retrospectives: Small Changes Can Pay Huge Dividends

My favorite part of the sprint is the retrospective.   It gives you the chance to step back, reflect on your work and progress, and set up new goals for the future.   Our team has an awesome tradition of holding our retrospectives at a local bar down the street.  We order a couple beers, lay out a few markers and stickies, and openly discuss how our sprint went:

The reason I enjoy our retrospectives so much is because of how honest we are about ourselves.  If someone did a good job that went unnoticed during the sprint, we are quick to give praise.  If there’s something bothering us, we don’t hesitate to voice our opinions and discuss the issue.  Everyone has a voice during our retrospective and we literally discuss every single sticky that is posted.

What’s great about this transparency are the changes you can make.   Take a recent sprint that we just completed—during our retrospective, we admitted that we were spreading ourselves too thin with not enough focus.  We were doing multiple stories at the same time, allowing story scopes to get out of hand, and also putting in too much work on un-related projects. We were working, but not working smart.

We discussed this very candidly during our retrospective and were all in agreement.  We decided to make a small change: during our next sprint, we would have one goal—work on getting our new service to production.  With every story, we asked ourselves, will this help us get the service into production?  If not, let’s not load it or work on it.  Since we hold our retrospectives right before planning, this gave us a clear mission when we were dragging stories over from our backlog to the next sprint.  When we came back to work the next Monday, we clearly understood what we wanted to get accomplished over the next two weeks.

The focus paid dividends. With one small change, we were able to take our average velocity per developer from 14.33 to 22, a 54% improvement!  When reflecting on our progress after the  sprint, we all agreed that the focus helped us knock down a ton more stories and get into a very healthy rhythm of development.  

It’s important to always remember that every sprint has room for improvement, so don’t hesitate to make changes and try new things.