The Structure for Retrospective Meetings in Agile Teams

Throughout my agile journey I’ve experienced and facilitated many retrospective meetings for agile teams but also for long running projects. Often I’ve experienced that teams and sometimes even facilitators are not familiar with common basic structure of activities that an agile retrospective meeting should follow in order to make the meeting go smoothly and to generate qualitative action items for improvement. From my experience it helps teams a lot to when retrospectives are created along this structure of activities. The structure is published in the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, which I strongly recommend for anyone who is new to the subject.

Set the stage

The “Set the stage” phase is the beginning of an retrospective and should “warm-up” participants. In this phase participants should be made feel comfortable and secure to speak openly, understand that their input and interaction is required and valuable as well as it is a meeting for team learning and improvements. A classic for this stage is to remind the group of The Prime Directive and the Vegas Rule (What happens in a retrospective, stays in a retrospective.).

Gather data

Gathering data is the first step in order to identify qualified outcome or action items of the meeting. In this stage participants are asked to provide input on past iteration or timeframe that is relevant for the retrospective meeting. The information can be revealed supported by and fitting activity for the retrospective. If the retrospective meeting has a particular subject, data gathered should be about this subject. Otherwise any kind of events, feelings, experiences or learning can be recorded for a retrospective that’s open/has no particular subject. The data gathered optionally could be grouped if there are interrelations, dependencies or affinities. These groups should be arranged semantically (cover a certain area or subject) and will be basis for the next stage “Generate insights”.

Generate insights

In this stage it is about diving deeper into the topic that have been presented to the group in the “Gather data”-stage. According to priorities, topics are discussed in more detail to identify underlying issues, impediments or even motivators or positive effects. Based on the insights that turn out in this stage, appropriate actions should be defined. Potential actions could be recorded during the “Generate insights”-stage already.

Decide what to do

Once subjects have been discussed and insights have been generated, it is time to think of how to improve. Therefore whether recorded actions from the previous stage could be refined or a brainstorming for actions to improve could be conducted. In any case at the end of the “Decide what to do stage” there should be a limited set of actions that should be implemented during next iteration. These actions should be clear to everyone. Furthermore it should be transparent how to measure these actions are implemented successfully. That way the team can actually see and measure its impact and decide whether the situation actually has improved or the action didn’t have any positive effect and can be skipped.

Close the retrospective

To close a retrospective is the final part of the meeting and should wrap up the session. It is the time to thank everyone for participation and openness and also to ask participants for feedback on the retrospective itself. Everyone should leave the retrospective with a clean conscience and good constitution.