Successful Agile Software Development depends on the agile team remaining adaptable and able to quickly respond to change. In order to do that, a structured approach to continuous improvement is necessary. This is accomplished via the Sprint Retrospective meeting. This meeting provides an opportunity to find out exactly what''s working, what''s not working and come up with ideas and an action plan for moving forward. Here are a few items that will help ensure the success of your next Sprint Retrospective meeting.

The meeting should include all members of the team, including the product owner. It should be treated like a working meeting, where all team members can participate and provide constructive feedback on the process. The Scrum Master should help to ensure that everyone can safely voice their opinion, and that no one team member dominates the conversation.

The success of the meeting also depends on how issues are addressed. This meeting isn''t a gripe session where the focus is solely on lobbying complaints with no intent to make things better. Rather, it is It is an open forum to explore creative ways to help the team improve. The key questions that need to be addressed are in the meeting are:

• What did we do well? - Don''t let every day successes be ignored. These are items that can be capitalized on. Learn what is going well so that you can repeat what works.
• What could we have done differently? - Sometimes improvement may just involve a tweak to an existing process. Identifying it and making changes quickly can keep a small issue from becoming a larger one.
• What do we need to improve on for next sprint? - There may be times when things just fall completely off track. That is OK. Again, this is about improvement. Treat it as an opportunity to learn.

Lastly, it is important that the team walks away with an "actionable" plan of attack for the next sprint. The below questions can be used to develop the action plan.

• What do we need to keep doing?
• What do we need to start doing?
• What do we need to stop doing?

Done properly, the Sprint Retrospective meeting goes a long way in helping agile teams improve software delivery. Please contact us to learn more about our agile software development process.