What is Agile Retrospective

An agile retrospective is usually done at end of every iteration as a process improvement way. The main goal of the meeting is to discuss what went well and what can be done to improve the further process. This meeting is attended by the whole team which consists of Testing team, development team, BA/Scrum Master and Product Owner. They play a significant role in continuous improvement in the Agile process. Team recognization is also done in such meetings to motivate the team.

Following are the significant features for Retrospective meetings :

1) A team can work out on the major issues/impediments faced during the iteration and various suggestions for them.

2) Managers and senior management are not likely to be part of such meetings.

3) Retrospective meetings usually take place just after the Sprint Review meeting.

4) Effective Retrospective helps the team in better coordination, understanding of various concepts, unit tests, test strategy and test coverage.

5) The time duration for the retrospective meeting is usually an hour.

6) A major goal is to improve the product quality by taking the suggestions from all team members and also verifying them with Product Owner.

7) In this meeting, the prioritization of the actions and lessons learned is done by Scrum Master.

8) This meeting helps the team to avoid conflicts and building the self-management within all the members.

9) Scrum Master must ensure that all the major discussion and action points are documented at the end of a meeting.

10) Tools such as Jira has inbuilt sprint retrospective template that can be used to conduct retrospective meetings.

So, Retrospective meetings help in taking better decisions, encouraging the team members to take ownership of new ideas and action items and creating mutual trust among team members. These meetings are an essential part of the Agile Process.