Retrospective Meaning
Benita Vandervoort
any exhibition or series of showings or performances, as of musical works or motion pictures, representing the work of an artist or performer over all or a major part of a career: a retrospective of John Ford's movies.
An Agile retrospective is a meeting that's held at the end of an iteration in Agile software development. During the retrospective, the team reflects on what happened in the iteration and identifies actions for improvement going forward.
The Agile retrospective can be thought of as a "lessons learned" meeting. The team reflects on how everything went and then decides what changes they want to make in the next iteration. The retrospective is team-driven, and team members should decide together how the meetings will be run and how decisions will be made about improvements.
Because Agile stresses the importance of continuous improvement, having a regular Agile retrospective is one of the most important of Agile development practices. The Ninth Agile principle outlined in the Agile manifesto states, "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." A framework, such as the one below, can be used to provide structure and keep discussion during the retrospective focused.
The form above is not the only way to hold an Agile retrospective. It is important to consider other alternatives which include, but are not limited to project post mortems, PMI retrospectives, six hats retrospectives, and asking the five whys.
An atmosphere of honesty and trust is needed in order for every member to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. Norman Kerth's work at the turn of the millennium was highly important to the development of Agile retrospectives and retrospectives in general. Kerth's prime directive states, "Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."
Definition: A retrospective is a meeting held after a product ships to discuss what happened during the product development and release process, with the goal of improving things in the future based on those learnings and conversations.
The meeting format is key to an effective retrospective since the value comes from the conversation and dialogue, not just a bunch of individual statements. A representative from each group should be present (if not, everyone involved), with each person given floor time to share their view of the experience. This can include marketing, sales, customer service, and operations representatives as well.
Participants should walk away from the retrospective with a better sense of how the project was experienced by everyone involved. It is an opportunity for customer support to share how they were inundated with complaints about a clunky rollout or how the UX team delivered really clear wireframes that sped up the coding process.
While these topics might have come up in another venue, the process of running through the entire project in a retrospective gives everyone the opportunity to discuss them in a group setting dedicated to looking back at what transpired, with the explicit goal of continuous improvement.
Any major release or project deserves a retrospective and should be held within a week of shipping before people forget what happened and move on to the next thing. Retrospectives can be held more frequently, including for minor releases, each sprint or even at daily or weekly standups.
A sprint retrospective is a team meeting that takes place at the end of a sprint, aimed at introspecting the sprint on what worked and what didn't, and how to improve in the upcoming sprints. It encourages open discussions and learning, while also fostering teams to reflect on both individual roles and overall team performance, ultimately contributing to enhanced future sprints and project success.
According to the agile manifesto, the last agile principle is "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." In the Scrum process, this practice is realized in the form of a sprint retrospective.
In some teams, product owners and Scrum masters often bow out of retrospectives because they think its an exercise for the development team, or because they think the team might have trouble being candid in their presence. Some teams don't treat retrospectives as a mandatory exercise and hold one after every few sprints. Both of these practices can be unhealthy. The Scrum team includes both the Scrum master and the Product Owner, so it's crucial that they understand the exchanges within a development team and the technical aspects of their work. It also helps the team to learn about the work of a PO and a Scrum master.
Sprint retrospectives in the scrum framework are often the first thing a team cancels when they're short on time. If nobody takes the floor during retrospective meetings, the scrum master may try to salvage the situation by keeping the conversation going until everyone decides the meeting is over. Without a constructive environment, some team members may start using the sessions to have unproductive conversations, so the team as a whole may decide these meetings are a waste of time.
There are more activities like these with varying degrees of complexity and time investment. Such games and activities are a great way to blow off some steam or break the ice within your team, but the effectiveness of your retrospectives should not depend entirely on how fun your meetings are. These meetings should be a safe space in your team culture to give feedback without any repercussions.
"Fail fast" is a common phrase in the agile world, but its meaning is at odds with the culture prevalent in a corporate environment. People subconsciously pit themselves against others and when you're always competing, you're less likely to try things you might fail at. Create a culture which rewards trying, not just succeeding. Failures can be great teachers and sharing them with your team makes everyone wiser. Healthy discussion is a great way to break the stigma of failure.
Conversely, the Sprint Retrospective is an exclusive meeting between the scrum team and the members who worked on the sprint's tasks. During this session, the team evaluates their teamwork and identifies areas for future improvement. The sprint retrospective meeting happens after the Sprint Review and before planning the next sprint. This process helps the team learn and become better over time. Both meetings play distinct but crucial roles in successful agile teamwork.
Scrum follows an inspect-and-adapt approach, so retrospectives are a critical tool in your process. They give your team an opportunity to routinely critique and improve your processes. Retrsopectives are all about growing with the people on your team: you learn to iron out disagreements, resolve conflicts, and work with people you don't agree with. This helps individuals become better team players, and great teams do extraordinary things.
A prospective study watches for outcomes, such as the development of a disease, during the study period and relates this to other factors such as suspected risk or protection factor(s). The study usually involves taking a cohort of subjects and watching them over a long period. The outcome of interest should be common; otherwise, the number of outcomes observed will be too small to be statistically meaningful (indistinguishable from those that may have arisen by chance). All efforts should be made to avoid sources of bias such as the loss of individuals to follow up during the study. Prospective studies usually have fewer potential sources of bias and confounding than retrospective studies.
A retrospective study looks backwards and examines exposures to suspected risk or protection factors in relation to an outcome that is established at the start of the study. Many valuable case-control studies, such as Lane and Claypon's 1926 investigation of risk factors for breast cancer, were retrospective investigations. Most sources of error due to confounding and bias are more common in retrospective studies than in prospective studies. For this reason, retrospective investigations are often criticised. If the outcome of interest is uncommon, however, the size of prospective investigation required to estimate relative risk is often too large to be feasible. In retrospective studies the odds ratio provides an estimate of relative risk. You should take special care to avoid sources of bias and confounding in retrospective studies.
Data harmonisation involves retrospectively adjusting data collected by different surveys to make it possible to compare the data that was collected. This enables researchers to make comparisons both within and across studies. Repeating the same longitudinal analysis across a number of studies allows researchers to test whether results are consistent across studies, or differ in response to changing social conditions.
Diaries are a data collection instrument that is particularly useful in recording information about time use or other regular activity, such as food intake. They have the benefit of collecting data from participants as and when an activity occurs. As such, they can minimise recall bias and provide a more accurate record of activities than a retrospective interview.
In retrospective studies, individuals are sampled and information is collected about their past. This might be through interviews in which participants are asked to recall important events, or by identifying relevant administrative data to fill in information on past events and circumstances.
Structured metadata define the relationship between data items/objects to enable computer systems to understand the contextual meaning of the data. It uses standardised content to facilitate the use of metadata for data discovery and sharing, and the relationship between metadata elements.
760c119bf3