Getting the most out of your Retrospectives
So yeah, you’re Agile, you’ve got two week Sprints, your requirements are Tight, and you religiously do retrospectives. Great. Seriously, great . Most people actually don’t do any of the above, so you’re already way ahead of the pack. The thing is, even with the best of intentions, retrospectives end up being about the current sprint, the task at hand, or, hey, even the user stories that you were working against. What they are not about is about underlying assumptions, the mental framework that you have in place that led to the current set of requirements, user stories, and so forth. To put it differently, we are all trapped within the bounds of the our current thinking processes, and rarely step outside our comfort zone. And therein lies the rub — working within our existing frameworks will, at best, lead to incremental change. For the truly significant improvements you really, really need to examine (and adjust!) your priors. And t...