Retrospective
- In Turkish
- Retrospektif
In short
A retrospective is a team meeting held at the end of each sprint to reflect on how the team worked and agree on concrete ways to improve next time.
What is a sprint retrospective?
A retrospective, often shortened to retro, is a regular meeting where a team looks back at a recent period of work and decides how to improve its process. In Scrum, the sprint retrospective is the last event of every sprint and is timeboxed to at most three hours for a one-month sprint, and usually less for shorter sprints. Kanban teams and other Agile teams hold retrospectives on a regular schedule too.
A typical retro gathers observations, discusses the causes behind them, and ends with one to three concrete action items, each with an owner. Many teams use simple formats to guide the discussion, such as Start, Stop, Continue or What went well, What didn't go well, What to try. At the start of the next retro, the team reviews the previous action items to see whether the changes helped.
Retrospectives only work when people feel safe to speak honestly, so they focus on the process, not on blaming individuals. A common analogy is a sports team watching footage after a game: the aim is not to punish anyone for a missed pass, but to spot patterns and practice something different next week.
A retrospective is often confused with the sprint review, which happens just before it. The sprint review looks at the product: the team shows stakeholders what was built and gathers feedback. The retrospective looks at the team itself: how its people, tools, and processes worked during the sprint. It also differs from an incident postmortem, which analyzes one specific failure, such as an outage, rather than a regular period of work.
Key takeaways
- A retrospective focuses on improving how the team works, not on the product.
- In Scrum, it is the final event of every sprint.
- Good retros end with a few concrete action items that have owners.
- Formats like Start, Stop, Continue keep discussions focused.
- A blameless tone and psychological safety are essential.
Example
START
- Pairing on tricky bugs
- Writing acceptance criteria before sprint planning
STOP
- Merging pull requests late on the last day
CONTINUE
- Short daily scrums that end on time
ACTION ITEMS
- Ana: add a "Ready for review" column to the board by Monday
- Team: agree on a noon cutoff for merges on the last sprint dayReaders ask
How long should a sprint retrospective be?
The Scrum Guide sets a maximum of three hours for a one-month sprint. For a two-week sprint, most teams spend about 45 to 90 minutes.
What is the difference between a sprint review and a sprint retrospective?
The sprint review inspects the product with stakeholders and updates the backlog based on their feedback. The retrospective is usually held by the Scrum team alone and inspects how the team worked, so it can improve its process in the next sprint.
Who attends a sprint retrospective?
The whole Scrum team attends: the Developers, the Product Owner, and the Scrum Master, who often facilitates. Managers and outside stakeholders usually do not attend, so the team can speak openly.
See also
- SprintTeams & Process, p. 26A sprint is a fixed-length period of one month or less, often two weeks, in which a Scrum team works toward one goal and produces a usable product increment.
- ScrumTeams & Process, p. 21Scrum is an Agile framework in which a small team delivers a product in fixed-length cycles called sprints, using defined roles, events, and artifacts.
- AgileTeams & Process, p. 2Agile is an approach to software development that delivers working software in small, frequent increments and adjusts plans based on regular feedback.
- KanbanTeams & Process, p. 10Kanban is an Agile method that visualizes work on a board of columns and limits how many items can be in progress at once to keep work flowing smoothly.
- Definition of DoneTeams & Process, p. 7The Definition of Done is a shared checklist of quality standards that every piece of work must meet before a team can consider it complete.
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