The Importance of Sprint Retrospectives
Sprint Retrospectives are a crucial part of our project management strategy at OmbuLabs . Because we are a remote and international team of software developers, we miss out on the “water-cooler” conversations and small talk that would normally occur between employees in a typical office environment.
Though it may seem small, those “hey, what are you working on today?” and “i’m having trouble with a client” conversations help keep the team up to speed.
It is important for project team’s to make time to check in and discuss how the project is going. For this we have the Sprint Retrospective .
We like to schedule a Sprint Retrospective for each client project every two weeks. It is an internal meeting and we invite all team members working on that project to join in.
During the Sprint Retrospective, we have each team member discuss the following questions:
- What went well in the sprint
- What didn’t go well in the sprint
- Happiness level with the project (1 to 5)
- What can be improved
In the call it is important to give each team member time to share their answers in depth with the rest of the team. We then like to give other team members time to respond and ask questions.
If a team member shares that they are having an issue or believes that something is not going well in the project, try to encourage them to share a suggestion for how it can be improved.
The goal of the sprint retrospective is to open a dialogue into how the project is going overall. Are we making progress on the project? Do all team members understand what the next steps are?
It is important to make sure everyone ends the call on the same page. A thoughtful Sprint Retrospective will help the team to continue to move in the right direction.