Creating Your First Sprint Retrospective with Azure DevOps

A Simple Guide to Getting Started with Sprint Retrospectives

5 min readMay 28, 2021

Introduction

A Sprint Retrospective is a time-boxed session that comes at the end of a sprint and examines how the previous Sprint went — what things worked and what didn't. It’s also an opportunity for the team to devise strategies for improving the quality and effectiveness of future sprints.

In this article, I demonstrate how to conduct a Sprint Retrospective using Azure DevOps.

Install the Retrospective Extension

Before beginning, you might want to check my earlier article about getting started with Azure DevOps boards.

In the top right-hand corner of Azure Boards, click the shopping bag icon and select the Browse Marketplace option.

Search for “retrospectives” and install the extension:

Create a Retrospective

On the left-hand side menu, click the new Retrospectives option and click the Create Board button:

In the Create New Retrospective modal that appears, give your retrospective a name:

Select the Good-Bad-Ideas option from the Apply template menu.

Below are the columns that will appear in your retrospective. Feel free to change the column names by clicking on each option, renaming, and hitting Enter.

Click the Save button to be taken to the retrospective board for Sprint 1.

You’re now ready to lead your first Sprint Retrospective!

How a Sprint Retrospective Works

During a Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team considers strategies to improve how things are done to ensure better quality work. Each member of the team has the opportunity to voice their opinions on:

What was successful in the Sprint?
What didn’t go right?
What will we commit to improving in the upcoming Sprint?

There are varying suggestions for how long a sprint retrospective should take. According to Scrum.org documentation:

“The Sprint Retrospective […] is timeboxed to a maximum of three hours for a one-month Sprint. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter.”

The Scrum Team should have identified improvements that it will apply in the next Sprint before the conclusion of the Sprint Retrospective.

Collect

Right now, we’re in the Collect phase of the retrospective, which allows the team to reflect on what went well, what didn't go well and provide suggestions for improvements.

Allow team members some time to add cards to the board by clicking the +Add new feedback button (as this is a demo, all of the cards added are in my name):

Give everyone 5-10 minutes to contribute their input to the board. Everybody must come prepared for a retrospective, so tell team members to add ideas to a notepad file continuously throughout the sprint to make points easier to remember.

After a few minutes, ask your team:

“Does anybody need more time to add their suggestions to the board?”

Next, ask team members to talk through each card they’ve added to the board. Or, an alternative is to spend a few minutes discussing cards in each column.

Points to Consider

It’s important that the meeting isn’t held simply because Agile says; here are some things to consider:

Keep the exercise time-boxed and structured to avoid the session descending into a requirements debate.
Focus on using the Retrospective to solve problems rather than letting it become a complaining session; if the same issues arise repeatedly, it’s a sign that you’re not making progress and need more concrete follow-up actions.
Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification.
Avoid pointing the blame at individuals and instead focus on improving processes.

Group and Vote

The following menu tab is the Group option, which allows you to group similar cards collected from different users:

The Vote tab gives each user the chance to vote for what they believe are the most important cards from the retrospective:

Act

Finally, the Act option allows us to take action on the suggestions made by the team. For example, we can create a miscellaneous task to customize Team channel notifications so that all developers are alerted for every new post: