Sprint Retrospective

Timebox: 1 hour for a 2-week sprint. Who: the team only. Owner: Scrum Master facilitates.

The most valuable ceremony and the first one cut when things get busy. That is exactly backwards — when things are busy, the process is what needs fixing.

How to run it in Quire

Create a task per observation under this one and tag it:

Then open the Sprint Retrospective sublist in Board view and group by tag. That is the retro board.

Agenda

1. Set the tone — this is about the system, not about people
2. Gather observations silently first, then read them out. Silent-first prevents the loudest voice from anchoring the room
3. Group and discuss the themes
4. Pick one or two action items. Not five
5. Each action item gets a named owner and a due date inside the next sprint

Output

• 1–2 Retro: Action Item tasks, assigned and dated
• Review of the previous retro's action items — did they actually happen?

Rules that actually matter

• Psychological safety is the whole product. If people cannot say what went wrong, the retro produces nothing.
• Blameless. Ask "what about how we work made this likely?" not "who did this?"
• One or two actions, done, beats ten actions ignored. A retro that generates a long list nobody completes teaches the team that retros are theater.
• Start every retro by checking last retro's actions. This is the step that separates teams that improve from teams that just vent.