Retrospectives in Scrum Process for Development Teams
With scrum framework, the product is developed according to iterations with fixed length termed sprints, so the teams can come up with software or updates at regular intervals. Milestones as they’re called are end of a sprint and they’re scheduled often to ensure a tangible progress with every cycle that helps everyone focus and stay motivated.
In SCRUM we have four stages for every sprint:
- Sprint Planning
- Daily Stand-up
- Sprint Demo
- Sprint Retrospective
For every sprint, charts and artifacts are used to motivate the team. Also, the demo gives an opportunity to present one’s work and that in turn motivates the team and the feedback can help improvise the software that’s developed. When done right, scrum can act as a catalyst and promote better team morale and productivity, and improve the overall development process.
Scrum team is differently staffed, as compared to other traditional projects. The three important riles include product owner, development team and scrum master. Since scrum teams are usually cross-functional, development team includes designers, tests, ops engineers and developers.
Product owners are the ones who promote the product and focus more on marketing requirements and business. They manage product backlog and liaise with the team to ensure the work is done and delivered on time. Besides they set targets and keep the team up breast.
Scrum masters are scrum champions and tutor the team, business and product owner on scrum and find ways to fine-tune the process. Basically, they oversee operations of the team and come up with improvements where needed. They also keep the team shielded from disruptions anytime possible. However, they shouldn’t be confused with project managers.
No Heroics. If you need a hero to get things done, you have a problem. Heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning.
Scrum team is usually self-sufficient and efficient at maintaining timelines. For every sprint, the team will have a retrospective, a meeting where the entire team will ponder on how scum has been working out and changes if any are needed. For every sprint period a product is produced and at the end of the sprint, a finished and ready-to-ship product or software is ready.
The sprint retrospective is usually the last thing done in a sprint. The entire team, including both the Scrum Master and the product owner should participate. You can schedule a scrum retrospective for up to an hour, which is usually quite sufficient. However, occasionally a hot topic will arise or a team conflict will escalate and the retrospective could take significantly longer.
There are many variations on this simple format. The Scrum Master can facilitate this sprint retrospective meeting by asking everyone to just shout out ideas during the scrum. The Scrum Master can go around the room asking each person to identify any one thing to start, stop or continue. Or, for example, he or she can tell everyone to focus on identifying something to stop this time because not much attention has been paid to things to stop in recent retrospectives.
