Q: Sprint retrospective is useless ?

What is sprint retrospective?

Retrospective is a sprint event that happened after the sprint review/demo. It gives the team to retrospect the sprint in terms of process, task and think of how to improve and do better.

According to scrum guide, 

the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness.

What do we do in sprint retrospective?

There are many suggestions and formats for the sprint retrospective meeting. We can find dozen of resources like miro that providing templates to the team to carry out the sprint retrospective.

We do hope the team to freely express their opinions as a member in the sprint. In my experience, we may start with the rating or emoji sharing to have a quick relaxed way to open our mind first. Sometimes we may try to make it casual, like sharing a fun fact. After that, we may spend time to write notes to think of sprint like "continue/start doing/stop doing". 

At the end, we shall share and elaborate a little bit more if it is unclear. And then vote for the most meaningful/important items to discuss the next action and improvement. We would review the action items and make sure we do follow up and improve in the next sprint.

 

The above one is the simplest one, there are various interesting retrospective games like sailing boat, ESVP

The most important concept I think is to retrospect and see how we can do better next time.

Why do people think sprint retrospective useless ?

Firstly, people may think it is wasting time to discuss in an informal meeting that everything is already black and white on the scrum board that how many tasks are achieved. It becomes meaningless to spend extra effort to evaluate further, especially during rushing time and many unfinished tasks remained in the sprint.

It is true that sprint retrospective is costing time since it normally spends an hour sitting in the meeting room without business value. In my experience introducing this event, everyone is reluctant to speak and share their deep-down feelings over the team or process. At the end, everyone keeps silence and the meeting becomes a solo speech to talk about my feeling and suggestions. The follow-up actions become extra tasks or jokes to the team. 

In this situation, I do agree retrospective is not helpful when the team is not even known to agile value or in the forming stage. It gives the team a thought of boring meetings and a regular routine to chill for an hour.

Secondly, people never open their minds to share thoughts and are afraid of the outcome of the truth. They will remain silent about bringing up ideas in the meeting. Even though some of them are willing to voice out their thoughts, they will mainly focus on its own benefit like asking for a salary increase and no need to work on Friday afternoon that may be irrelevant to the sprint. We do appreciate the ideas and expectations for better benefit but it is a little bit out of purpose for retrospective. It may be something out of control to scrum master, especially when the team hasn't a good productivity (no tasks completed) and fails to deliver the committed working software. 

At that time, "I"(scrum master) was helpless to fulfill the team view and even conflict with the team that kept explaining that if we successfully delivered the product, we would have the bargaining power to express what we wanted. But we misuse the chance on the retrospective and just think of something good for ourselves (or unrealistic dreams) but never something about the places we need to improve and do better next time.

In such a case, retrospective is a totally failure and useless. It may take a very long time to educate and share the"team" mindset and agile values. When everyone has no commitment to the sprint or team, agile and retrospective sounds like a meaningless meeting.

Is retrospective useless ?

Yes but no again. 

When the team has no honesty or agile mindset or ownership, it would be failure like I mentioned above. It just may not be a good timing to start with a retrospective meeting. I will suggest having a better understanding of commitment (or even punishment) to emphasise the importance of sprint planning. And then through education over agility and responsibility, it may be better and then start considering the proper retrospective and encouragement.

Apart from the unsuccessful story, we do have other good teams on applying the retrospective. Everyone would focus on both good and bad things, we keep learning from mistakes and also provide a chance to communicate. We keep introducing better processes like code review time, definition of done and learning from others on some tasks. It becomes an important event for the team to do better and evolve to the next stage.

Conclusion

Sprint retrospective is a powerful tool to increase quality and effectiveness but it depends on the team’s maturity and culture. It may take time to adapt the agile mindset and purpose for this meeting. Also it is important to time-boxed and pick up the most important one to improve gradually.

(By the way, if you are searching for this topic, you are probably someone who cares or thought for the retrospective. It is better than others who don't care at all. My suggestion is to gradually promote retrospective.

Firstly, try to educate the team with ownership/commitment/agile value. It normally takes time and also not company culture/everyone fit into the mindset. Suggest to see advice out from senior management if no changes.)