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The Core Agile Practices
There are certain core Agile practices, that when you practice them you will gain the benefit of Agile whether you call yourself an Agile team or not. In fact, many different organisations might be using many different Agile Framework names, but not practicing many or all of these practices behind the scenes.
Knowing the practices themselves will also help you get a deeper understanding of Agile as an approach. The Agile Practice Guide by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance has all of this information, and this one in particular is retrospectives.
Check out the video and article below!
Agile Retrospectives
In Agile development a retrospective is a meeting often held at the end of an iteration of around two weeks. As we’ve seen, iterations can be between two and four weeks, where we’re usually releasing an increment that a customer can see, feel and touch. We’re getting that early feedback on whether they’re happy with the product and happy with the requirements of that product.
At the end of that iteration, now we have a short meeting to discuss what was successful, what could be improved, and how to incorporate those improvements and retain those successes that we’ve had in future iterations. That means as we’re going along we’re improving and getting better. So we ask ourselves:
- What worked well?
- What didn’t work well?
- What have I learned?
- What still puzzles me?
By asking these questions and putting the feedback that we’re gathering back into our process, we are continually improving.
It also meets Agile principle number 12 directly, which is “At regular intervals the team reflects on how to become more effective, and then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” So we’re actually checking in on a regular basis to make sure that we’re on the right track, and if we’re not we can tune and adjust.
The retrospective is seen as one of the most important practices because it helps the team learn about and improve their process over time. We’re directly asking for that feedback from our own team and we’re incorporating that feedback into the team to improve.
Now it doesn’t have to be at the end of an iteration where we’re releasing something, we can also hold retrospectives at any other time, for example:
- When the team completes something
- When the team ships something new
- When more than a few weeks have passed since the previous retrospective
- When the team appears to be stuck and completed work is not flowing
Remember we’re seeing that workflow because we have the visual representation of our work on the Kanban board. We can clearly see whether things are flowing through that Kanban board or not and we’re facilitating daily stand-ups so that we can talk about it and see if we can remove any blockers. But maybe work still is not flowing and maybe we need to hold that retrospective to see what’s working well, what’s not working well, and maybe something is puzzling us that we just can’t get past and we need help to move past.
Lastly we can also hold a retrospective at any other milestone we like – it doesn’t have to be something set in stone you could hold a retrospective any time you feel the need to.
And that is the core Agile practice of Retrospectives.
– David McLachlan
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