How Long is a Sprint Retrospective?

Sprint retrospectives are essential in the world of Scrum.

Retrospective meetings help teams move forward on the right path. They minimize errors and risks and enhance productivity in a project.

As useful as they are, you don't want your sprint retrospective to take up too much of your project's time. So, how long is a sprint retrospective? How much time should you budget for one?

Well, this depends on factors such as team size and sprint duration.

We're going to cover just how long your sprint retrospective should be. Read on!

How Long Should a Sprint Retrospective Be?

Before we dive into duration, let's recap what a sprint retrospective is.

Sprint retrospectives are foundational to Scrum-managed projects. These are meetups that aim to review how the team performed in the previous sprint. The team will discuss their performance during the sprint, what went well, and what did not.

When setting up a sprint retrospective, all team members must be actively involved. This means that each team member needs to share their ideas and experiences of the sprint.

This can take a while, so it's important to have a set time frame for these meetings.

When figuring out how long a sprint retrospective is, consider the size of your team, and the length of the sprint.

Based on sprint duration, here are the usual times for how long a sprint retrospective takes:

• One-week sprint: 45 minutes
• Two-week sprint: 1.5 hours
• Three-week sprint: 2.25 hours
• Month-long sprint: 3 hours

Of course, this is generally speaking, and duration will differ across sprints and teams.

Let's discuss some of the factors that determine the length of the sprint retrospective.

1. Team Distribution

How is your team distributed? Is your office a hybrid space, or is everyone physically working together?

Will the retrospective take place remotely or in person?

Remote retrospectives with distributed teams can often take a bit longer.

2. Size Of The Team

How many team members are involved?

Of course, the larger the team, the longer the retrospective will be. This is because each team member will need to share their experiences and insights.

3. New Team Members

Do any new team members need to be brought up to speed?

If the team consists of many new people, then retrospectives will probably take longer.

If the team has worked on multiple Scrum projects together before, they should already be well-accustomed to working with each other and running efficient sprint retrospectives

4. Type Of Retrospective Framework

What type of retrospective framework is being applied?

While sprint retrospectives all follow the same general format, some are a lot more detailed than others.

For example, you could use a retrospective framework that simply considers what went well and what didn't. This will be relatively fast and straightforward.

If you consider other elements, such as achievements, opportunities, risks, wishes, action items, and so on, the retrospective could take a lot longer.

While sprint retrospective lengths can vary, the one important thing is that you set a relatively concrete schedule for running these retrospectives.

If you leave it open-ended, retrospectives could take too long and impact team productivity.

By setting clear time guidelines for the retrospective, teams can run more efficiently and prepare appropriately.

This helps your sprint retrospectives create a greater impact without turning them into annoying, time-consuming tasks for your team.

How Often Should Sprint Retrospectives Take Place?

The main purpose of running a sprint retrospective is to improve the productivity and performance of the sprint ahead. This means that sprint retrospectives should take place each time a team comes to the end of a sprint.

This way, the team can reflect on the sprint, identify successes and challenges, and use this information to guide the way they approach the next sprint.

It's important to run and finish a retrospective before starting a new section of the project.

Some retrospectives take a slightly more ongoing approach and can be managed and checked regularly during the sprint. These are retrospectives that take the view of "what is going well and what isn't?" as opposed to "what went well and what did not?".

Using retrospectives like this helps to make your project more fluid. This can benefit management decisions as information on the sprint is recent.

The frequency of sprint retrospectives depends on your project and how this is divided.

Some sprints take a few days, while others take weeks or months. Whatever the case, sprints should always end with a retrospective.

It's a good idea to run a retrospective whenever you finish a major task or project goal. This helps the team make more efficient progress.

At the same time, you don't want to run retrospectives too frequently, as this could cause unnecessary delays and irritate the team.

How to Run a Sprint Retrospective

Answering the question “how long is a sprint retrospective?” can only be done if you understand exactly what these retrospectives involve.

Sprint retrospectives should be carefully planned and efficiently managed. Having a clear agenda and process for your retrospectives helps to make them more efficient.

When establishing the agenda for a sprint retrospective, there are a few important steps to take.

1. Set The Goal

Before you start a sprint retrospective, you'll need to have a clear goal that you want the retrospective to achieve.

This goal should be closely aligned with the overall goal of the project.

There's a lot you can achieve with a sprint retrospective. Some examples are: improving communication within a team, improving communication with stakeholders or product owners, enhancing the operating workflows of a project, boosting team morale, and so on.

Once you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with the sprint retrospective, you can use the goal to help you determine what format the retrospective will take.

This will also help you understand how long the retrospective should be.

2. Get The Whole Team Involved

Successful sprint retrospectives are all about collaboration and open communication.

Without this, you won't be able to get insights from everyone on the project, which means a lot of valuable information could be left out of the meeting.

Establish a meeting format that is fully inclusive of the team!

Get everyone on the team to share their ideas and insights on the different topics your retrospective will include. Making this an open discussion can help teams identify useful action items at the end of the retrospective.

3. Gather The Information

It's easy to talk about and reflect on a project. However, you need to guide the retrospective so that it's focused on extracting the right information from your team.

This information should line up with the overall goal of the retrospective.

There are various sprint retrospective templates available that you can follow, each one taking a slightly different approach to the kind of information they gather.

Drawing on each team member's experience will give you meaningful data that you can use to optimize the sprint ahead.

4. Identify Insights

How will you use this information once you have gathered it?

It's important not to just gather information but to use it to identify patterns, risks, and problems in your workflow.

By comparing the different insights gathered and analyzing them carefully, teams can identify action items to use in the next sprint.

This process is not just about looking at specific events, but focusing on the bigger picture and asking why those events took place.

5. Establishing A Plan

A retrospective is focused on understanding team performance in a sprint. However, this won't be very useful if you don't generate some kind of action plan from this information.

Once you have gained insights and perspectives, the next step is to establish how the team will use this information going forward.

Consider setting out new guidelines, action items, or requirements for the project.

The whole point of retrospectives is to continually optimize future sprints. Cleverly using your data is necessary for this.

6. Close the Retrospective

Once everything has been discussed, close the retrospective and summarize the meeting.

Make sure that the entire team is on the same page and that no questions are left unanswered.

This closes the retrospective and marks the completion of the sprint. The team can move on to the next sprint!

Final Thoughts

So, how long is a sprint retrospective meeting?

Depending on the circumstances, it can take anywhere from half an hour to three hours. It depends on the sprint, the team, and the project.

Whatever the case, it's always important to plan your sprint retrospective and understand the goal behind it.

This will help your retrospective run more efficiently and achieve a more useful outcome for the project and the entire team!