Lessons Learned or Post Programs or Post Project Analysis – is one of the most powerful tools for proactively improving the quality of your work. Retrospective – is separately allocated period of time, to turn their eyes on their work, learn from experience and ask yourself the following questions: “What was good and how to do the same in the future?” and “What went wrong and how this can be avoided?”
Despite the fact that retrospectives are the Best Practises, I found that they are used very rarely. Two main reasons for this: “It is difficult to gather the entire team for a seminar on hindsight” and “We once did, but it does not do any good.”
The first reason arises from the fact that the workshops retrospect occur at the end of development projects. Most team members are already working on other projects, and those who stayed busy release of the project or its support. Flexible methods solve this problem is very simple: you should not do just one retrospective at the end of the project, it is necessary to do a retrospective on its entire length. Advantages:
The second reason for the unpopularity of retrospectives – very often able to gather a lot of interesting and useful information, but there is no way to use the data obtained in practice in future projects.