A popular interview question for Scrum Masters is: “Which one is the most important Scrum event?.”
Obviously, the purpose of the question is not to actually mark one event as the “most important” event, but to see the candidate’s thought processes. There is no right answer, and there is no good answer.
I have nevertheless thought about this question quite often. And if I were forced to pick one event, it would be the retrospective.
The reason is that the retrospective is in my opinion the least likely event to happen “by accident” and it is not easily replaced by other tools or methods. It is a human impulse to ignore the need for improvement when the pressure is high to deliver results. A formalized retrospective gives a team the space to think about improvements, even if the customer is asking for everything to be delivered “tomorrow”.
Also, if I had to develop a plan for a staged approach to an agile transition (instead of the “big bang” strategy many organizations seem to prefer), I would probably start by introducing regular retrospectives for all teams. So in this approach, retrospectives would exist even before the introduction of full-fledged Scrum.
I actually believe that the omission of retrospectives in supposedly agile organizations is an underestimated but highly critical antipattern. Often, retrospectives are not the last but the first meetings to be cancelled or postponed when other meetings seem more important. However, this is one important sign that an organization is missing basic aspects of agility, that the agile mindset is not well-developed and that the organization follows agile methodologies as a cargo cult.
AgileEvangelist 