How long should a sprint retrospective take? Incl. exceptions
Some Scrum newbies are looking for “How long does a sprint retrospective take” or are interested in the typical length of a retrospective. I’m happy to give you a few numbers!
How Long Sprint Retrospective
Typical length of a Sprint Retrospective
To give you an initial figure: Most of the retrospectives I’ve attended have lasted between 45 and 90 minutes. But that, of course, depends on one thing - how long has it been since you last performed a retrospective? That, in turn, is often related to the length of your sprint.
To give you a simple rule of thumb: For every week of sprint, you plan 30 minutes more in your retrospective.
- Weekly Sprints: Retro takes 30 minutes
- Bi-Weekly Sprints: Retro takes 60 minutes
- Monthly Sprints: Retro takes 120 minutes
- Quarterly sprints: Definitely don’t take 6 hours 😄…
Okay, no the rule of thumb comes to an end, as you might have guessed. Let’s talk about some edge cases.
How long are sprint retrospectives in some special cases?
Quarterly Sprints, 12 weeks, are pretty long (they only make sense for specific circumstances, but that is a different topic). According to our rule of thumb, you might think you should do a 6 hour retrospective in these cases. But that would be too much.
How long sprint retrospective: Quarterly retrospectives
Instead, in my experience as a Scrum Master and Psychologist, I recommend to have a maximum of 3 hour retrospectives, plus a 15 break in the middle. Why? 2 things for your background:
- Firstly, a good retrospective focuses on developing hypotheses for potential small improvements, small steps.
- Second, a good retrospective does not create a long term change plan with 10 huge action items for the team. Such plans don’t work anyway. Instead, a good retrospective tries to implement 1 to 3 action items.
So, in light of this, why would you need 6 hours? You don’t. 3 hours is more than enough. If you need more time, you should think about performing retrospectives more regularly 🙂 .
By the way - the quality of these action items obviously counts. So our post with 7 tips for great action items might be interesting for you.
How long sprint retrospective: Short retrospectives
In some cases, the team doesn’t have much time. Then you might think: Let’s do a short retrospective! Well, you can do that, but you should keep a few things in mind. We have some tips for you in our post “ Short retrospective - better fast than not at all ” summarized.
By the way, our Retro & Team Health Check Tool can be very helpful in keeping to the timeboxing in a retro - and making the retro more playful and productive overall. Feel free to check it out:
Conclusion - Duration of Sprint Retrospective
I hope you know have a better feeling for how long a sprint retrospective should take. If you have questions about other special retrospectives, we are happy to help!
A big role for the length of a retrospective obviously plays the retrospective format. Given this, our 32 kickass retrospective ideas for beginners and professionals. may also be of interest to you - have fun!
