At the end of each Sprint, the Scrum Team meets for the Sprint Retrospective. The purpose is to review how things went with respect to the process, the relationships among people, and the tools. The team identifies what went well and not so well, and identifies potential improvements.
The Sprint Retrospective is one of the most important and least appreciated practices in the Scrum framework. It is important because it gives teams the chance to customize Scrum to their unique circumstances. It is under-appreciated because some people have a misguided view that it takes time away from doing “real” design, build, and test work.
The Sprint Retrospective is a crucial contributor to the continuous improvement that Scrum offers. Scrum teams hold Retrospectives each and every sprint, allowing teams to take advantage of insights and data before they are lost. Because a Scrum Team meets at the end of each Sprint to inspect and adapt its Scrum process, it can apply early and incremental learning throughout the development process and thereby significantly affect the outcome of the project.