Skill: retrospective

What I do

I manage the process of reflecting on past work to identify improvements. I facilitate blameless analysis of failures and capture successful patterns to ensure continuous improvement in the development process.

When to use me

• After completing a major feature or project
• Following a production incident (post-mortem)
• Periodically (e.g. every sprint) to refine team workflows
• When a recurring problem or friction point is identified

Core principles

1. Blamelessness — Focus on system failures rather than individual mistakes. Assume everyone did the best they could with the information they had.
2. Action-oriented — Every retrospective must produce specific, owner-assigned, and time-bound action items.
3. Timeline reconstruction — For incidents, build a factual timeline before trying to identify causes.
4. Distinguish root vs contributing — Use the "5 Whys" to dig past surface symptoms to the underlying system issue.

Patterns & examples

4Ls Format:

• Liked: What went well? (e.g. "The new CI pipeline saved us hours.")
• Learned: What new knowledge was gained? (e.g. "We learned that library X has a memory leak.")
• Lacked: What was missing? (e.g. "We lacked clear requirements for the edge cases.")
• Longed For: What do we want next time? (e.g. "I longed for more pair programming during the refactor.")

Root Cause Analysis (5 Whys Example):

• Problem: Deployment failed.
• Why? The database migration timed out.
• Why? It was trying to index a 100M row table.
• Why? We didn't test the migration on a production-sized dataset.
• Why? Our staging database is too small.
• Root Cause: Inadequate testing environments for production scale.

Anti-patterns to avoid

• ❌ Pointing fingers — Using the retro to air personal grievances or blame individuals.
• ❌ Retrospective amnesia — Identifying the same problems repeatedly without taking action.
• ❌ Skipping successes — Only focusing on what went wrong; it's equally important to know why things went well.

KB Reference

~/vaults/baphled/3. Resources/Knowledge Base/AI Development System/Skills/Thinking-Analysis/Retrospective.md

Related skills

• critical-thinking — Analysing the findings of the retro
• assumption-tracker — Identifying assumptions that led to failure
• systems-thinker — Understanding the system dynamics that led to issues
• memory-keeper — Capturing the "Learned" section for future sessions