“Knowledge is power.” “To know is half the battle.”
When it comes to agile engineering teams, end to end visibility into how your sprint goes truly is power. The real-time data helps you understand operational bottlenecks, barriers to product roadmap, and practical insights into team’s well-being.
Most engineering teams we know are striving hard to understand team dynamics, stay on top of engineering operations, and conduct healthy sprint retros. But here's the kicker: despite their efforts, many teams are grappling with outdated methods of running retrospectives – relying on manual processes, anecdotal insights, and even word-of-mouth information.
The Challenges of Traditional Sprint Retros
When we ask devs what they feel about sprint, the response is either a quip like ‘we are just passing by’ or an uneasy smile. But, what makes the present paradigm of sprint retros ineffective, and crumbling for engineering teams? Regular discussions with our customers has led to some insights:
- Limited visibility into engineering workflows often result in ending sprint retros on surface-level discussions, with no actionable plan in place. Visibility creates trust, and transparency, especially in retros with multiple stakeholders, and cross-functional teams.
- Lack of data-driven feedback makes teams resort to guesswork, and anecdotal feedback. This method puts more weight on an individual’s feelings, and subjective inputs, and not necessarily helps to understand the whole picture in real– ‘We had a spike in cycle time last sprint. I think the devs must have been slow.’
- Without complete understanding of bottlenecks, any mitigation step becomes counterproductive. While a team’s cycle time spiked due to slower code reviews, without data-driven insights, they only managed to discuss higher incidents, or tired developers as cause of derailed sprint velocity.
- This lack of visibility also snowballs into micromanagement during sprints where managers lack access to a developer’s work items, and have no way to check whether the sprint is going as planned.
- Already, engineering teams spend 15% of their time in meetings. Adding one meeting on top that lacks actionable insights, or growth-centered discussions adds to futility of unproductive meetings.
Breathe Life Into Your Sprint Retros with Hatica
What if we told you all your sprint retro challenges can be eliminated with one single tool.
Enter Hatica—the catalyst that transforms sprint retrospectives from routine to remarkable. Hatica’s engineering management platform helps teams to lead effective sprints, communicate the impact of engineering efforts to product owners, and scale software delivery:
Here’s how engineering teams can use Hatica to run productive sprint retros:
1. Understand Overall Sprint Health
As a team lead, or an engineering manager, how do you answer these questions: "Did we fulfill our sprint goals? What was the amount of unplanned work? How much time did we spent on bugs vs story points”
Finding these answers becomes easier with real-time visibility, and a single pane view of all sprint activities. Hatica’s sprint retro dashboard does just that, offering actionable insights into all sprint efforts, and understanding how the sprint fared, the milestones fulfilled, and bottlenecks encountered.
With Hatica’s data-driven retro dashboard, get a data-driven summary of your SDLC, right from active coding time, to completed story points, people well-being, and investment allocation across the sprint. This way, your engineering team nuetralizes operational frictions, communicates bottlenecks effectively– large PR size, high cycle time, unstable code churn, or low maker time.