10 Simple & Important Agile Retrospective Ground Rules
Agile retrospectives are an essential part of any agile team. They give team members the opportunity to reflect on their work, identify opportunities for improvement, and set goals for the next sprint. However, for a retrospective to be effective, it’s helpful to establish a few ground rules. They serve to guide the conversation and ensure everyone is heard. Below, I’ll give you examples of ten ground rules for agile retrospectives. They can help you make the most of this valuable team development opportunity.
Which are the 10 ground rules for agile retrospectives?
- Basic Rule # 1 - Maintaining a safe and open environment
- Basic Rule # 2 - Respect for the opinions and perspectives of others
- Basic Rule #3 - Encouraging active participation of all team members
- Basic Rule # 4 - Honesty and transparency regarding problems and challenges
- Basic Rule #5 - Focusing on actions and solutions instead of blaming
- Basic Rule # 6 - Prioritizing the goals of the team
- Basic Rule # 7 - Identifying and documenting action items
- Basic Rule #8 - Following up on actions from previous retrospectives
- Basic Rule # 9 - Encouraging the team to be prepared
- Basic Rule #10 - Keeping the session short and focused
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #1
Maintaining a safe and open environment
If you only have time and capacity to implement one rule or guideline, then let it be that first one. The rest will almost take care of itself.
To maintain a safe and open environment, it is essential to foster a sense of inclusion. It is also important to ensure that everyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts and feedback.
There is probably no question that psychological safety is more than just a trend or buzzword. But if you want to delve deeper into the topic or need some facts and figures, e.g. to convince someone else of the relevance of psychological safety, then definitely have a look at this article . There, the concept and its relevance are examined and explained in more detail.
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #2
Respect for the opinions and perspectives of others
This is another almost indispensable basic rule for agile retrospectives. It is important to listen actively and avoid interrupting others or rejecting or evaluating their ideas. One way to do this is to use techniques such as “paraphrasing” or “mirroring”. This shows that you are actively listening and encourages others to share their thoughts. It is also helpful to use “I” statements and not make assumptions or jump to conclusions about the ideas and statements of others.
"Many team members are afraid to speak up!"
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"We discover too many unexpected issues & bugs at a late stage!"
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"Why does it sometimes take me hours to prepare a simple retrospective?"
Solve this challengeBasic Rules Agile Retrospective #3
Encouraging active participation of all team members
One way to do this is to use icebreakers or team-building activities at the beginning of the retrospective to make team members feel more comfortable and relaxed. You can find concrete methods and ideas for this in our blog article about check-ins.
It is also essential that the facilitator can encourage quieter team members to speak up and redirect the conversation if one person is dominating it. You can read more about how this works and what techniques are used in this article: Facilitating a Retrospective.
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #4
Honesty and transparency about problems and challenges
Team members should feel comfortable talking openly and honestly about any problems or obstacles encountered during the sprint. The team can use various techniques to identify the underlying causes of problems or challenges that have occurred and develop solutions to them. Discussing them together and recording an action item on them, if necessary, is nonetheless legitimate and often sufficient. You can find an overview of three different workshops in this related article: Versatile Retrospective Methods & Team Workshops with Surprise Effect .
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #5
Focus on actions and solutions instead of blame
In addition, it is important to create a blame-free environment where team members do not have to fear consequences for sharing their thoughts. Instead, they can focus on identifying and addressing the underlying issues.
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #6
Prioritize the goals of the team
Prioritizing the team’s goals requires a clear understanding of the team’s sprint goals and aligning the retrospective with them. One method is to use “SMART” goals .
In addition, it is important to set a clear purpose for the retrospective and focus the dialogue on it. The team can also use approaches such as “SWOT analysis” to identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks to ensure that it is on track to achieve its goals.
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #7
Determine and document action items
A retrospective should not only have a goal, but also a clear agenda. One way to achieve this is to document and track all action items and improvements identified during the retrospective. Read more about this in our article on examples of good action items . In addition, it is important to assign responsibility for each action item to specific team members. The team can also use tools like Kanban boards to visually track the progress of each action item. By the way, this also works great in our tool Echometer. Try it out directly via this link: To the retro setup.
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #8
Follow up on action items from previous retrospectives
To ensure that the action items from previous retrospectives are implemented, you should set a clear timeframe for implementation in the team and appoint specific team members to take responsibility for the individual items. In addition, it is critical that action items are reflected upon or discussed within the next retrospective. Remember, action items are not the same as tasks! The point is not to implement them. Their main goal is to help you iteratively learn something and then adjust something based on what you learn. If this sounds surprising or new, or you just want some inspiration on how to use action items well and effectively, feel free to check out this article .
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #9
Encourage the team to be prepared
Setting a clear goal for the retrospective and providing a template or guideline for what data or information is needed will motivate team members to be prepared. In addition, team members should ideally have done research and be prepared to support their assertions with specific examples or data. This makes the dialogue more productive and ensures that the team makes real progress.
Did you know that Echometer lets you send short surveys to your team before a retrospective? This ensures that everyone is prepared and you have much more time to reflect instead of collecting data. Why not try it out with the following retro?
Health Check Retro: The 5 Agile Values
The agile values and principles belong to the basics of a Scrum course. Only when you live up to them, you can reach higher agile maturity levels achieve. This health check helps you to reflect on the 5 agile Scrum values from a different perspective with your team and to make them measurable - see below for an insight.
Health Check Retro: The 5 Agile Values: How the retro works
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Random Icebreaker (2-5 minutes)
Echometer provides you with a generator for random check-in questions.
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Review of open actions (2-5 minutes)
Before starting with new topics, you should talk about what has become of the measures from past retrospectives to check their effectiveness. Echometer automatically lists all open action items from past retros.
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Health Check
All team members can answer the health checks anonymously on a scale. Then go through the results of the health checks together and record any additional comments if necessary. If you use the same health checks in several retrospectives, you can also track trends over time in Echometer.
- Courage: We value people showing courage.
- Respect: We value each other’s ideas, even when disagreeing.
- Commitment: Every team member is committed to follow through on what they have promised.
- Focus: We don’t allow ourselves to be distracted from reaching the sprint goal.
- Openness: We are open to constructive feedback and grow from it.
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Discuss retro topics
Use the following open questions to collect your most important findings. First, everyone does it themselves, covered. Echometer allows you to reveal each column of the retro board individually in order to then present and group the feedback.
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Catch-all question (Recommended)
So that other topics also have a place:
- What else would you like to talk about in the retro?
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Prioritization / Voting (5 minutes)
On the retro board in Echometer, you can easily prioritize the feedback with voting. The voting is of course anonymous.
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Define actions (10-20 minutes)
You can create a linked action via the plus symbol on a feedback. Not sure which measure would be the right one? Then open a whiteboard on the topic via the plus symbol instead to brainstorm root causes and possible measures.
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Checkout / Closing (5 minutes)
Echometer enables you to collect anonymous feedback from the team on how helpful the retro was. This creates the ROTI score ("Return On Time Invested"), which you can track over time.
Health Check Retro: The 5 Agile Values
Health Check Questions (Scale)
Note: This retrospective format asks for agreement with the given Health Check items on a scale.
Basic Rules Agile Retrospective #10
Keep the meeting short and focused
To keep the retrospective short and focused, it is helpful to have a clear agenda and goal for the meeting and to stay on topic. It is also important to have a moderating person who keeps the conversation on track and redirects the discussion if it deviates from the course. To set specific time limits for each agenda item, the team can also use techniques such as “Time-Boxing” . This is especially useful if you find that you often need longer for certain points or the whole retro than planned. Recently we also found out how long a retro should actually take and what too short or too long means in this context: Analysis of 30,000 retros .
Maybe you’ve heard of the acronym E.L.M.O.? It doesn’t have much to do with the little red fellow from Sesame Street, but stands for:
So: Enough, let’s move on.
At Echometer, we internally call this a “jelly fish” and every time someone on the team feels that a topic is going too deep or too far away, we “throw a jelly fish”. Why jelly fish? They are neutral, impersonal and there is definitely something funny about it.
Conclusion: Good retrospectives thanks to simple basic rules
All in the spirit of keeping it short and focused: I hope these 10 basic rules for agile retrospectives will help you make the most of this valuable team development opportunity. Following these rules and applying the techniques and tools described above will make it even easier for your team to identify areas for improvement and set goals for the next sprint. This will help the team to continuously improve and evolve. We wish you a lot of fun doing so!
"Many team members are afraid to speak up!"
Solve this challenge "We discover too many unexpected issues & bugs at a late stage!"
Solve this challenge "Why does it sometimes take me hours to prepare a simple retrospective?"
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