Mirror, mirror on the wall – A personal retrospective exercise

Great post!

During the last year I did quite some Scrum coaching for different teams in different organizations. What I found is that a lot of Scrum teams follow the ceremonies and the rules of Scrum. That is a good thing. What I also found out is that many Scrum teams do not get the most out of their retrospectives. The talk about the process, mention what goes right and mentions what goes wrong, but they do not really follow up the points mentioned. Rookie Scrum teams get some value out of their retrospectives. Most of the times because it is easy to find some points of improvement. The build does not work, more unit testing is needed, we should sit together. But the more mature a Scrum team becomes the harder it gets to find improvements.

A scrum team (just like any other team) goes through 4 different stages of maturity.