We Just Cancelled a Sprint Retrospective. It’s a Disaster🤯

Photo by Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash

I feel tense in my shoulders today. This is because I failed to speak up in the stand-up. I didn’t say what I know to be true and let myself and my whole team down.

As a result of my actions, the team won’t improve and we will be unable to deliver as many features as we should be able to.

So what is the crime of The Secret Developer this time?

I didn’t speak up when we cancelled the Sprint Retro.

The Working Environment

I’ve been working at my current position for something like a year. To say I’m not enjoying it is something of an understatement and I’m just starting to come to the truthful conclusion that it isn’t me it’s them.

Today I feel that I’ve got just a little more evidence that the correct conclusion has been reached.

Our feature team has just started four-week sprints because we failed time and time again to deliver work in two-week sprints. 

The Situation

At the end of today’s standup at the end of the sprint, we had the following questions from the tech lead and product management.

Is there anything you want to raise today for the retro or we can cancel.
I don’t, but it’s really a question for the team.
I’ll ask the Scrum Master later.
[to the team] Anyone want to raise anything?

We were met with a stunning wall of silence to this last question. Now I’m of the opinion that retrospectives should (near) never be cancelled.

The Consequences

How are we ever going to ensure that we are improving in our work and delivery as a team without reflecting on it?

I don’t care about that. I care about the impact on ME.

Here’s the rub of the situation. I feel like rubbish. I pushed some code two weeks ago and the code isn’t tested, and I would like to raise that. I wanted to get some test data for the work I produced and a week later nothing materialized.

So, what is the reason that I decided to shut my stupid mouth and use my stupid brain?

Don’t rock the boat.

By this, I mean both psychological safety and the fact I don’t want to rock the boat in my current position.

I do feel that I am in a low-expectations environment and I do not want to appear to be someone who doesn’t “fit” into the team.

I don’t fit into this team as I want to create good code and deliver features. I’m concerned about getting fired for it.

As amazing as that sounds, I’m afraid that is how I see the situation.

As a result, instead of making things better, and helping our team to deliver value to our customers, I am sitting silently feeling tension in my shoulders.

I really hope that your work situation looks nothing like this.

Solutions

Other than getting rid of me (and I would do that if I employed myself) there are a few obvious ways to make retrospectives better for all involved.

Improve psychological safety by making people feel like they can speak up in meetings (I’m not the only one who feels this way).

Remove the boredom of retrospectives by making them relevant and important to the participants.

I’ve created a whole article about how to make retrospectives cool (not disco vicar, but actually useful to the team). Feel free to take a look.

Conclusion

Basically, I’m a bad developer or something but there are solutions. But The Secret Developer isn’t saying what they think to help out their employer and instead keeps writing these blog posts.

Like I said. I’m not a good use of space at my current company.