Rules of Scrum Ceremonies — Sprint Retrospective Meeting

The Sprint Retrospective occurs after the Sprint Review and before the next Sprint is scheduled. For a one-month sprint, this is a three-hour meeting at most. The retrospective meeting is basically an “improvement” meeting to find ways and means to identify potential pitfalls, past mistakes, and seek new ways to avoid them, with all people in attendance – product owners, Scrum Masters, development team members, and optionally with stakeholders.

The Sprint retrospective meeting is time-boxed to 3 hours.

It is attended only by the Team, the Scrum Master, and the Product Owner. The Product Owner is optional.
Start the meeting by having all Team members answer two questions:
❑ What went well during the last Sprint?
❑ What could be improved in the next Sprint?
The Scrum Master writes down the Team’s answers in summary form.
The Team prioritizes in which order it wants to talk about the potential improvements.
The Scrum Master is not at this meeting to provide answers, but to facilitate the Team’s search for better ways for the Scrum process to work for it.
Actionable items that can be added to the next Sprint should be devised as high-priority nonfunctional Product Backlog. Retrospectives that don’t result in change are sterile and frustrating.

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