Retros for adults
February 13, 2025
I have been working as a programmer at the Dutch Railways (NS) for three years. In my team, we work, of course, Agile/Scrum with three-weekly sprints, the daily standup and other meetings such as reviews and retrospectives (retros). Especially those retros always used to last a very long time and were often overly imaginative. Role plays, expressing feelings with lego, everything came along. I just participated, but I didn’t always feel really taken seriously. And if anything was learned from it, it was forgotten five sprints later. But in this, our retros did not differ from what I was used to from other employers.
When I started at NS, I landed in a large team of about fourteen people. We had a product owner, a full-time scrum master, a UX designer, an architect and a few testers. About half of the team were programmers, including myself. With that team, we worked on a growing number of APIs built in Dotnet, Java and Kotlin, which mainly ensured that people could rent one of our 20,500 nation-wide available OV-bikes or park their own bikes in our bicycle parking garages. At first glance, this is not a very complex matter, but if analysts and other colleagues are allowed to come up with sub-products for seven years, then more and more code has to be added. So much more, in fact, that those APIs continued to grow in number and size to such an extent that we slowly lost control.
A bicycle parking at a train station
For six months now, under the guidance of a new architect, we have been working on a project to make the APIs a bit more specific again and to split the team in two workable ones. However, this coincides with a budgetary problem, so it has been decided that all teams of the department have to make do with a total of two scrum masters. They won’t have time for retrospectives any more, so we have to do those on our own now.
The first thing we decided was to keep them simple from now on. Two columns with post-its: one for what went well and one for what could be improved. No more lego. One of my team members called it retros for adults. I don't know about that, but it's certainly refreshing.
Perhaps we'll even learn a thing or two from them.