One of the key aspects in any agile methodology is the "inspect & adapt" process.  Making sure that teams take the time to look at what is and isn't working for them and to then make the necessary changes to try and improve things.  In Scrum this is called the Sprint Retrospective and occurs at the end of every iteration (the Sprint).

The documentation on Scrum talks about sticking to 3 questions to keep the retrospective on track and to prevent it degenerating into yet another meeting; those questions being:

  • What worked?
  • What didn't work?
  • What should we change?

However after a while it's very easy for these questions to become rote and for the retrospectives to stop being agents of change and improvement because the team has fallen into a rhythm and things just become the norm.

Diana Larsen and Esther Derby have written a very useful book (Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great) about this subject and how you can keep retrospectives productive, valuable and pivotal in the success of your team.  At the start of the year the good folks at Google had the two ladies come and have a chat with them about their experiences and have made a video of their presentation available on YouTube.  It's not the most riveting presentation in the world, but they do bring a lot of useful tips and information to the table and hopefully you'll be able to get something useful out of it for both you and your team.