At the end of each sprint, we hold a retrospective. The book “Agile Coaching” by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley says:
An iteration retrospective should help the team explore the following:
- What insights do they have from the last iteration?
- What areas do they want to focus on improving?
- What ideas can they act on in the next iteration?
Take this too literally, and you end up adding the thing next time that stops you getting wrong the mistake from this time. “That time, the explosive was hidden in a shoe, so let’s add shoes to the list of banned items.”
What if it was just a mistake? Do you need to change the way you do everything to fix a problem you encountered once?
Retrospectives need to take a longer-term view. How are we doing, and how specifically did that change this sprint? Do we need to change how we do all of our tasks because it didn’t work for that one task? How many hundreds of tasks has our process worked for?
I discussed this with Steven Baker who described a team where the retrospective facilitator kept a risk register across multiple sprints. Yes, this thing happened and it was bad, but how bad? How often has it happened before? How likely is it to happen again? How bad would it be if it does?
