The retrospective is one of the cornerstones ceremonies of the agile process. As an engineer I looked forward to these meetings more than any other. It was my chance to give props to the standup folks I worked with. To question how things were happening. And over all I liked that I had a place to post my ideas.

An agile retrospective is semi anonymous. It asks three basic questions.

• What Went Well?
• What Didn’t?
• What can we experiment with?

These questions will lead to cultural and technical actions taken in the next sprint to try.

These actions will generally end up in the working out or not, columns of the next retro.

I am an experimenter, not a good planner but a person of action. I kept an Experiments.md buffer open so I could jot down ideas as them came to me while I worked.

When retro time came I would slam the retro board with ideas. They had been festering my head for the past two weeks. The team would graciously discuss them some went into the bin, others were tried. Some even made it to a permanent part of our practice.

All and all the process of the retro was 30 minutes to 2 hours of my time went to the one retro per sprint.

Reduce the batch size. Change the Questions.

The retro is not limited to sprint planning. I use it for on boarding new people, my self-included.

I have a wiki of my current role, how it will evolve. Can we try doing this with you? Your doing this and it is not working. Good on ya for this.

Retros for learning.

If I am on a team of people learning something new I will stop a session to ask.

• What have we learned?
• What is Confusing?
• Should we continue on this path?

This only Takes 30 second of a team’s time but it makes sure that no one falls behind. Often it will cement ideas for team members that thing they know something but are not sure. If gives people a place to not know.

When I am in a mobbing session I will start with a copy of my guidelines for mob programming as a wiki page. To start we will do a min retro between every complete rotation of navigators. We will experiment with time based driver sessions vs task based separation. Or how many people can navigate at once.

The point is that it is never too soon to ask yourself or others is this working? Is this not working? What can I try?