Essay --

Some agile teams hold a retrospective meeting once a week along with their daily project stand-up meetings. It is called â€Å"stand-up† because the meeting is essentially conducted with all the team members standing. The basic idea behind this is to keep the meeting as short as possible typically 15 minutes or lesser. During this meeting the team members discuss about the status of the project and the issues that they are facing. The weekly retrospective would help in identifying any process changes that are required immediately. As the completion time for the sprint nears, the time taken to discuss about process improvement for the current sprint decreases as improvements for the ongoing sprint has been discussed in the everyday stand-up meeting. This results in a better software product as the team is continuously working on improving its knowledge management process. Each retrospective has both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The qualitative part discusses the various team practices and the success of each. It also comprises the specific challenges that presented themselves during the iteration. Upon identification of the issues, root cause analysis is performed and potential corrective actions are discussed and recorded. The quantitative review gathers and reviews any metrics the team is using to measure its performance. Purpose An iteration retrospective is a reflective process. The iteration retrospective enables the team to reflect on the iteration just completed and derive new ideas for process improvement. This helps instill the spirit of continuous improvement or kaizen mind in the individuals and the team, and helps assure every iteration makes some small improvements in the processes. The Scrum Master plays an import... ...s an insight into the project from the perspective of each team member and make them realize that it’s the team that can make the change. A qualitative study can be done among companies employing the agile methodology about the effectiveness of the retrospective process. Interviews can be conducted with the scrum masters and certain important people within the team to elicit what kind of improvements they have seen in their projects due to the action items suggested in retrospective meetings. A major challenge facing most agile teams is how to keep the retrospective meetings fresh. A comparative study can be done among agile teams about the various retrospective techniques that they employ and how effective and interesting these techniques. This would give an insight into a plethora of ideas on conducting a retrospective that will never become boring and redundant.