[gravlaks]

Why do you hate them? I find them very useful. Everybody gets to voice their frustrations and what works, which we can learn from and improve upon.

What if I our team has a concern that isn't mentioned in a checklist?

[ManlyBread]

The recent retrospectives I had were used against me in my yearly evaluation where it was pointed out that I "complain too much" and that it "looks bad". That's about it for my involvement in this process.

[mrslave]

Gotta love how they bank all these complaints for withdrawal at your annual bonus review instead of addressing them with you quickly and privately like an adult.

[kqr]

You're attributing your hate all wrong if you blame the retrospectives for this, rather than bad management.

[ahefner]

You are really making me appreciate that my line management has never had any involvement in "scrum ceremonies" including retrospectives.

[_y5hn]

Yet to see any of the methods applied in working conditions. Even the best intentions on "following processes" tend to lead nowhere or just become abused by misapplication.

What works is when people share goals and collaborate.

[fridif]

While I really enjoy Agile and Lean development, my most recent employer had an extremely toxic culture where retrospectives were basically akin to the Hundred Flowers period of China. If you voiced frustration, you provided an O(1) way for them to find who to bully into quitting next.

My current employer just lets me do literally whatever we want. A service is basically owned by a developer. And so far my customers absolutely love my work.

[pjmlp]

Not the op, on most projects the improve upon part is mostly out of scope for the team, so it ends up being only about venting frustrations.

[MattGaiser]

> which we can learn from and improve upon.

Not OP, but on my past two teams and my present team, this part has never happened. It was/is just a box ticking exercise.

[js8]

What I don't like about our version is that we only focus on small portion of all things in the list (from the OP), mainly the Agile procedural issues.

I think the purpose of having such a checklist is not to limit the discussion to other concerns, but rather serve as a reminder what all the different things can be a problem and should be discussed.

[zelos]

Maybe I've just been unlucky, but in my experience retrospectives are mostly virtually identical every time: nothing happens about the frustrations, so they become a complaint session instead of something positive.

[kqr]

What can you do to change that?