The last question on our recent team poll was about retrospectives – why do we do them?

The responses below are pretty standard, but I see a benefit that is not immediately obvious in these responses. If the team feels that they can change their processes formally, there is less incentive to just change things on-the-fly without informing anyone outside the team. This transparency also helps keep the team from radical changes without sufficient justification.

• Open forum for team to change its processes.
• Team goes over what is and isn’t working and what needs to be improved.
• Forum for constant team improvement.
• Team discusses processes to stop, start, or continue in order to improve.
• Used to identify process problems and to make improvements to them.
• Helps team understand what is and isn’t working with the current process. Identifies things to work on in the next sprint.
• Allows team to improve process incrementally.
• Used for process improvement. A forum to express/discuss good/bad things and to change process.
• Used for process improvement.
• Forum for the team to air grievances and list what went wrong/right with the prior sprint. An avenue of change.