Retrospective Antipatterns

Scrum Retrospective Meeting is an opportunity where scrum teams can end their visual impairments like color blindness by devising ways to make their upcoming sprint more fun and challenging.

Critical retro antipatterns that we must look out for can be.

Ignoring the white elephant. During retro scrum team considers it a norm to ignore discussing issues that seem to happen occasionally, but when they do happen they can turn things very ugly. Such issues should be discussed and their risk plan be prepared. Another white elephant can be the issues that can’t be handled by scrum team and scrum team members assume these issues cannot be worked out. In reality this is not the case most retro notes are read by all stakeholders and they readily work on resolving such white elephant issue.

Follow up on your last retro. Don't forget to share the last retro action items statuses with scrum team. Most scrum teams are motivated when they see their scrum master are following up and ensuring the commitments being met as discussed in last retro. This also encourages the scrum team to make upcoming sprint more fun and challenging

Waiting for end of sprint retro to happen. During sprint execution scrum team should rather have midterm retro than waiting for end of sprint. This enables scrum teams to re-align, re-validate, re-focus and give early demos to customer with enhanced feature value ensuring better deliveries in the subsequent part of sprint. This also establishes way to enhance sprint value and enriching product increment.

Nothing Personal. Retro points and action items should be explicit and action by too should be defined clearly. Keeping a balance between assigning process ownership to scrum team members and avoiding personal attacks or finger pointing because it can demotivate and derail the process success. (It’s purely Business Nothing Personal)

Busting Impediments. Handling impediments reactively may not be the proper approach. At retro scrum team should decide on identifying impediment patterns, discussing how to draw up impediment impact diagram and the metrics that can help provide way to measure like throughput analysis, control flow, cumulative flow, release burnup, queue size, cycle time, etc