Time for retrospective
A guide on choosing when to perform an online retrospective
The first step into a successful online retrospective is knowing when to perform one. An online retrospective is a meeting to discuss on:
- A defined increment of work delivered
- A just completed cycle of work
- A periodic get together for a team working close together
In this page we will provide some guidance on when it's the right time for an online retrospective for each occasion.
As shared in the introduction, depending on the occasion a retrospective can be held:
- End of a quarter for a whole company or departmental team, to discuss the results and work done on the previous quarter.
- Right after releasing a new feature or an increment of a feature, for the engaged team to discuss on how that work was.
- Right after an incident was handled, to discuss on how the team handled that incident and identify areas of better handling.
- Periodically every 2 or 4 weeks, for teams working in a continuous way to reflect on the period since the previous retrospective and check any progress done on open action items
The most usual and suggested timeframe for a retrospective is to perform a meeting every 2 weeks with the team you are working the most on a daily basis. This retrospective is called the sprint or scrum retrospective.
Like shared above a retrospective can be held for a wider or more arbitrary teams working on bigger work cycles. This kind of retrospective is called an agile retrospective.
Team O'clock data
We have analyzed some of out latest data on retrospectives, to share the current status over teams performing retrospective meetings in the platform. To extract this information we took into account active teams, excluding all demo retrospective sessions. It's also worth noting that we considered activity over the last 3 months.
Based on the above data, we can see that most of the teams perform 1 retrospective on average per quarter. These retrospectives fall in the agile retrospective category of more sparse retrospectives over mixed teams. Most probably talking about end of quarter evaluation or feature releases, which include many departments.
The more retrospectives teams had during that period means that the teams are working closer together and care about improving their collaboration and processes.
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