Hi Devs,
Most of us tackled with SCRUM at least at once. As for me, I do my job about five years using the SCRUM methology. It helpful, it allows us to deliver features and fixes more predictive and transparent, and sometimes, in time :-) you know what I mean. I was a SCRUM master, team leader, ordinal developer, chief... and know what? I still can't understand why we need retrospective.
Last Friday we had one, and our SCRUM master opened a Word document with empty three-column table and asked us the question - "John/Sam/Dan, what you think about last sprint, what was good, what we need to change and what is ugly?". You know that question and I always in trouble what I should to answer. Look, I have a lot of JIRA's, I communicated well with others (BAs, QAs) to get them to solve, and I solved them. Nothing to say - ALL GOOD! And everyone of us said nothing, because - all works well. Right after the meeting, our SCRUM master said that my team-mates "aren't evolved into product". Hey dude, these guys deliver features/fixes every two week in-time and mostly error-free, you can't judge them for the silence on the Retrospective meeting!
If I can't communicate with someone, have hardware problem, or my IDE license has been expired - I don't need to wait until end of the sprint, to tell about it on the retrospective, otherwise I won't do my job well.
As SCRUM methology said - "discuss problems and circumstances with other team-mates..." Cool, but I have time to discuss about on the daily meetings.
So, what do you think about Retrospective? How do we need to cook it well?
Top comments (2)
It's a bit of a generalisation, but you could say that daily standups are supposed to be short meetings, where problems are flagged and afterwards followed up by the the bare minimum of people needed to solve the problem. Retrospectives on the other hand involve the entire team comming up with ways to prevents any problems that did occur from occuring again in the future.
As a result, daily standups tend to focus more on technical challenges while retrospectives tend to focus more on process issues. If you never have any of the latter then you're quite fortunate.
Thanks, Alain.
Fully agree with you. How to pass the wisdom to our scrum master... :-)