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Title: What's wrong with sprint retrospectives and how to fix them
Proposer: Chris Smith
Proposer: Michael Upton
Type: Workshop
Duration: 90 mins
Description:
Do you often find yourself struck with a sense of deja vu in the retrospective meeting at the end of a sprint? Do you spend your time arguing about things to START, STOP or CONTINUE every single time? Perhaps you feel like you are just highlighting the same old problems, which never get fixed? Has the team rebelled completely and decided that retrospective meetings are a waste of time?
The drive to inspect and adapt is one of the most important aspects of agile software development. A great way to bake this approach into your process is by having regular retrospective meetings that engage and challenge the team to solve their own problems and make things better. However, these meetings can be difficult to run well and drive improvement. In fact, many teams sleepwalk through sessions, treating them as a box-ticking exercise that signals the end of the iteration.
Maybe it's time we tried a bit harder to make sprint retrospective meetings work?
In this workshop, Chris and Mike will explain exactly how to put together an awesome sprint retrospective. They will offer insights and tips from their experience of running sprint retrospectives every two weeks, as they try to keep each one fresh, relevant and engaging.
Attendees will try novel activities that can be used to gather information and challenge team members to consider problems from a new angle. They should leave the session equipped with new techniques to apply at the end of their very next iteration.
Presentation History
This workshop will be based on a well-received session we gave at the Agile 2014 conference in Orlando, Florida, the details of which can be found below: