Benefits of Agile Retrospective Meetings

An Agile retrospective is a meeting of the software development team of a company held at the end of the project to discuss the successes and the failures throughout the project. This meeting makes the developers understand how to not repeat the same mistakes in the future and get a more efficient team. Basically it works on inspect and adapt principle. We will discuss the benefits of Agile Retrospective meeting in this article.

While developing new software or updating existing software, the team of software development needs to face various challenges and also there are so many ways to beat those challenges it could be anything related to the features, functionality, accuracy, efficiency, interface etc. of the software being developed or updated by them.

Some of the challenges faced by the software development teams are described here to make you understand it more clearly:

Unnecessary or incomplete features:

If there are some unwanted features in the software which are actually making other things of the software affected. If the features are incomplete such as entering the name but there is no submit button. In these types of situation, the team needs to work on it in order to correct it.

Features dependencies:

If one feature is dependent on other, let’s suppose A is dependent on B and if user does not want to use the feature B he or she would not be able to use or get the option to use the feature A. This problem shall be fixed by the team in order to make the software more flexible for use.

Multiple review cycles due to various testing:

If there are problems found while testing the software it needs to be redeveloped to correct the error and then again there will be final testing only if there is no error or problem found. If the same or different errors keep on appearing while testing, it will increase the number of review cycles which is a time-consuming process.

Defects and Bugs:

If there are defects and bugs other than the errors and problems related to the features they need to be fixed before the testing process.

As each developer in a team is assigned for a particular job within the project and each of them will not face the same issues and challenges and the latest achievements. At the end of the project, each of the developers who participated in the project will discuss their success to be followed by the team members in the future and also the failures which should not be repeated.

By this meeting, all the team members are going to be educated about each and every challenge and achievement even when worked on the project partially.

At the end of this meeting, you will get a better software development team. If this Agile Retrospective meeting is repeated by the team after each project completion, the development team will get more efficient. It is good for understanding the complete project development with all the success and failures for the new members of the team, fresher developers as a part of a team and interns.