Retrospective and Feedback

Straight out of the Scrum guide¹:

The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.

and

By the end of the Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team should have identified improvements that it will implement in the next Sprint. Implementing these improvements in the next Sprint is the adaptation to the inspection of the Scrum Team itself.

There is a lot said and written about this meeting, how to conduct it etc; e.g. at Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki. But, as always, I advocate that the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) should guide your thoughts and actions.

The technique I use 98 out of 100 times is SSC (Start-Stop-Continue). The remaining two percents are often focused on theme based retrospectives (e.g. “House rules”, “Handle technical debt”) or other techniques (e.g. 4Ls (Liked-Learned-Lacked-Longed For), KISS (Keep-Improve-Start-Stop)).

Retrium has a great post on how to run a retrospective based on Start-Stop-Continue.

Feedback

The simplicity of SSC also makes it ideal for use in feedback situations. Using the keywords Start-Stop-Continue as reminders or headings will help you structure your feedback.

But, and this is extremely important, you should NEVER give feedback for Start and Stop without consent. Why it’s okay to do so for Continue is because the content of such feedback in nature will be positive, while Start and Stop could be the opposite (depending of how you deliver your feedback). The Start and Stop should preferably be given in an environment where the receiver feels safe. And I would also suggest that you give feedback face-to-face and not (only) in written form, especially when it comes to Start and Stop.