Use retrospectives to improve how you do the work together.
Teams want to keep moving forward with their work. Pausing feels counterintuitive: why stop, even briefly, when you can keep moving ahead with the development?
If you don’t pause and reflect, then you keep doing the same steps. These steps might lead you in the wrong direction. It might also mean you get faster at doing the wrong thing. That’s not so good.
Pausing and reviewing how you do the work as a team, provides the opportunity to consider what you might do differently. Doing things differently might provide an improved way to do the work. Taking an hour or two, at the end of each sprint creates the space for the time to discuss the previous sprint.
The simplest version is to have each team member add sticky notes to each of these categories: what to keep doing, and what to try. Maybe you want to be more explicit with: keep, stop, start, do more, and do less categories. Both work well. After you give people ten-fifteen minutes to add stickies to each category, then group similar ones, and pull the key takeaway into one sticky to do in the next sprint.
Use this with your team
At the end of the next time box put a retro into the team calendar. Let people know in advance so that they can think about things the night before. Then just do what’s above.
You can also do retros at the end of events too: I’ve done them at the end of workshops, courses, and hack events. This provides an opportunity for feedback, which can help improve the next event. Doing this in person is also better than via surveys as you can ask people follow up questions, to dig deeper, and resolve ambiguity.
Just remember: some reflection and action to try, is better than none. So if you can only start with 30 minutes, then that is better than nothing. Do the retro, see the results. Make small experiments to improve how you do the work.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.