Tool Mentor: Conducting an Iteration Retrospective with Engineering Workflow Management

Synopsis

"The iteration retrospective is a short team meeting held at the end of an iteration, wherein team members gather in a private, safe environment to discuss the efficacy of their practices and define improvements for the upcoming period."

Details

The Scrum Master facilitates the Iteration Retrospective with the team and captures information what worked and what didn't work well in the Iteration and how the team can do better the next time around.

Prepare

The Scrum Master sends out meeting invitations. See Meetings and Engineering Workflow Management for general guidfance on preparing and conducting meetings.

Conduct Quantitative Review (Part 1)

The Scrum Master facilitates the meeting, ensuring that it stays within the allocated time, and participates as a peer.

Step Tool guidance

1. View the Sprint Goals

Click Work Items > My Queries

Run the query "Sprint Goals- <team name>".

This query was created in Configure Team Area EWM .

2. Discuss the Sprint Goals

Open the Sprint Goal (created as a Team PI Objective) work item:

  • If the team met the sprint goal, change the state to Resolved.
  • If the team did not meet the sprint goal, set the Planned for attribute to the next iteration or to the backlog.
  • If the goal is no longer relevant, change the state to Invalidate it.

3. Collect and review the Sprint (Iteration) Metrics

For more information see Metrics.

 Iteration metric reports are displayed on the  Team dashboard.

Click Project Dashboards > All [Project name] Dashboards > [Team Name]

These reports were setup in Configure Team Area EWM .

Conduct Qualitative Review (Part 2)

The Scrum Master facilitates the meeting, ensuring that it stays within the allocated time, and participates as a peer.

Step Tool guidance
1. Review improvement stories from current sprint

Click Work Items > My Queries

Run the query "Improvement Stories - <team name>" .

This query was created in Configure Team Area EWM .

2. Discuss what worked well

Record what worked well for future reference.

Click Work Items > Create Work Item > Retrospective

Add a section in Notes titled:

  • What worked well in the Sprint?

3. Discuss what didn't work well, and how we can improve

Record what did not work well for future reference.

Open the retrospective work item.  Add a section in Notes titled:

  • What didn't work well and how can we do better next time?

Consider performing a team level self-assessment.  See IBM Safe Team Self Assessment.

4. Create stories for future improvements 

In order to track the improvements that the team decides to do, you can create stories, assign them to owners and mark as completed when done.

You can create the improvement stories with the retrospective work item as parents as follows:

  • Create a Story work item
  • Describe the improvement
  • Add the retrospective as parent:
    • Click the Links tab
    • Click the arrow next to Add Related and select Add Parent

Follow-up

The Scrum Master performs the following housekeeping steps.

Step Tool guidance

1. Standard meeting follow-up items

This includes creating work items from meeting notes, soliciting feedback from absent members, resolving any work item associated with the meeting, and creating snapshots of meeting-related work products.

Meetings and Engineering Workflow Management

2. Advance the current Sprint

In addition to standard meeting followup items the Scrum Master updates the project environment to reflect that the current Sprint is over, and starts a new Sprint.

Even though the start and end dates for each Sprint have already been defined, Engineering Workflow Management doesn’t advance to the next Sprint automatically, even though the current one was completed. This needs to be done manually by the Scrum Master.

  • Click the Administration  icon and select Manage This Project Area.
  • Click Timelines.
    In the Defined Timelines area, expand the timeline to display the Sprints.
  • Select the new Sprint
  • Click the Set the Selected Iteration as Current  icon

See Creating timelines and iterations.

Relationships
Related Elements