How To Implement Scrum In 10 Easy Steps - Step #10: Review, Reflect, Repeat

So you’ve got your backlog in order, estimated your backlog, clarified your requirements, planned your sprint and created a collaborative workspace.

You've sprinted to achieve your sprint goals, run daily stand-up meetings and tracked progress with a daily burndown chart.

Now you've come to the end of your Sprint and finished when you said you would. All that's left to do now, is Review, Reflect and Repeat...

Sprint Review

At the end of the Sprint, hold a Sprint Review meeting. Invite the whole team. Invite all the key business stakeholders. Invite senior stakeholders including executives where appropriate. The more interested parties the better!

Review what was delivered in the Sprint. Demo the software. Whether it's complete, working software prior to a release, or work-in-progress in a long-running multi-Sprint project, demo what has been completed in the Sprint. Let team members demo the areas they have worked on.

The purpose of the Sprint Review is three-fold:

1. It allows team members to show what they've achieved and demonstrate their contribution to the product.
   
   
2. It allows all key stakeholders to see what's been done, and provide valuable feedback on a regular basis, while there's still time to take it on board.
   
   
3. It helps the team to stay focused on the deadline of the Sprint - no-one wants to show up at the Sprint Review with nothing useful to demo.

Sprint Retrospective

Following the Sprint Review, hold a Sprint Retrospective meeting. Invite the whole team. Invite the Product Owner. But this meeting is not for the wider stakeholders. Typically it might follow on immediately from the Sprint Review.

The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to reflect on how things went during the Sprint. It's a chance for the team to discuss the Sprint and consider how they could improve things.

Together the team should:

• Review the final Burndown Chart. How did it go? Did the team deliver what they committed to at the start of the Sprint? Note the outstanding hours in a spreadsheet so the team's success rate can be plotted on a graph over time, to see if it's getting better or worse. This is a tool for the team to gauge its progress by. It's not a stick for management.
  
  
• Review the team's Velocity? Velocity is the number of points estimated on the original product backlog, for the items *completed* in the Sprint. Only items 100% complete and delivered, signed off, in the software count in the team's Velocity. Again, plot this on a graph so the team's Velocity can be tracked over time, so the team can see if it's delivering more or less as time goes by. Velocity will gradually settle around a norm, and can then be used in Sprint Planning as a gauge for how much the team could realistically achieve, based on their track record.
  
  
• Discuss what went well? (try to make sure it's repeated next time)
  
  
• Discuss what could have gone better? (try to understand why)
  
  
• Decide what the team will do differently in the next Sprint? (try to pick a few actionable points that can actually be done differently immediately in the next Sprint)

This is a continuous learning process.

Traditional project management methods, such as PRINCE2, also encourage continuous learning, through the production of a lessons learnt report on closure of the project.

The trouble with this is people don't always remember enough by the end of a long project. Or perhaps there is so much to reflect on at the end of a large project, that there are too many things to consider and the result just isn't actionable. And often on completion of a traditional project, the project team disperses onto other projects or back to where they came from, preventing them from applying their learnings as a team.

In Scrum agile development, like the product development itself, the learning is in small, bite-sized chunks. Little but often. While there is still time for the feedback to have a positive impact on the project.

Repeat

The team is now armed with valuable information - about the product, about their performance, and about some of the impediments in their environment, e.g:

• How the software looked after the last Sprint.
• Feedback about the product developed so far.
• To what extent the team was able to deliver what it committed to in Sprint Planning.
• The team's Velocity and what is achievable in a typical iteration.
• What went well.
• What didn't go so well.
• What will be done differently going forward.

All that's left for the team to do now, is repeat the process, with the greater knowledge gained from above.

Realistically it takes 3 or 4 Sprints for the team to get into a rhythm. To apply the improvements and get used to the process. For the Velocity to settle around a norm. And for the team to gel...

That's all folks!

So that's it! That's basically Scrum, and how you can implement it in 10 easy steps.

Of course, in reality, the steps aren't all that easy. The steps involve humans. And software development. Tricky combination!

Nevertheless, the Scrum process is inherently easy. And depending on your situation - certainly in my experience - Scrum and agile development can help your success rate in many many ways.

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See also:
How to implement Scrum in 10 easy steps:
- Step #1: Get your backlog in order!
- Step #2: How to estimate your product backlog
- Step #3: Sprint Planning/clarify requirements
- Step #4: Sprint Planning/estimate tasks
- Step #5: Create a collaborative workspace
- Step #6: Sprint!
- Step #7: Stand up and be counted!
- Step #8: Track progress with a daily burndown chart
- Step #9: Finish when you said you would
- Step #10: Review, reflect, repeat...

'Implementing Scrum' PowerPoint Presentation

10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development

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