People get the wrong impression about retrospectives. They read that it’s a meeting where you list what went well, what didn’t, and what you want to change. They describe it like this:

The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for team members to bring up anything about the Sprint they feel needs improvement.  For example, a team member might say he felt he had to complete work that should have been completed by another team member.  Or a team member might say she received emails constantly which prevented her from getting any work done….

Or like this:

The format is a discussion and brainstorming. The ScrumMaster facilitates the retrospectives and let the team choose what aspect they want to improve for the next Sprint. Because the team is very technical, most of the discussion revolves around improving engineering practices, i.e latest frameworks, continuous integration, BDD, etc. Improvements get accomplished. But the point is the team thinks that rather than allocating special time to do retrospectives, they said why can’t they just do that within the sprint? The team gets the idea from Kaizen that is implemented in Toyota where the team gather in an instance to find a way where they can improve rather than going to a specially allocated sprint retrospective. Read More