As teams following the "Agile1" software development approach for project completion, it makes prudent sense for testing managers to reflect on a logical phase (sprint2) in retrospection after the sprint is complete. Such retrospection, based on the real time data of a team's immediate evaluation and past experience of success and failure, offers the greatest leverage in the hand of a manager for project or process improvement. Sprint retrospection involves capturing, managing, and disseminating technical knowledge and process wisdom to improve outcomes in current and future projects.

This paper shares a sprint retrospective checklist that is being used for a highly critical project our team is engaged in. Besides helping in evaluating overall project health, this checklist also helps in identifying and tracking goals set for development and quality engineers, improving efficiencies, and drafting recommendations for future sprints.

Ajay Jain has more than nine years of industry experience in testing and validation of mobile and desktop publishing software. He is currently working with Adobe Systems, Inc. as Quality Engineering Manager, leading and managing the Instantiation (Deployment, Provisioning and Services) QE team for Adobe Creative Suites products. Prior to Adobe, Ajay Jain worked with industry majors like Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs Development Center) and Skyworks Inc, where his experience ranges from building a startup testing team from scratch to a resource optimized, efficiency driven team certifying multiple product lines.

Ajay has an active interest in knowledge sharing on best processes and practices and has written and published several papers on Quality Matters, Adobe Quality Newsletter (Internal), and hosted birds of feather session at Adobe QE Summit. Two of his papers, "Power of Glide Path: Statistical approach for controlling and adding Predictability in a testing project" and "Well processed, well done - Suggesting 5 light weight processes for optimizing software test management earned him speaker invites to the 8th All India Software Testing Conference 2008, and SPICE Conference 2009 respectively. He also has a patent invention - Meritorious Disclosure award to his credit.

Ajay holds a B.Tech (Engineering) degree from Delhi Institute of Technology and a Specialized Diploma in Business Administration from the Institute of Management Technology. Reach him at ajjain@adobe.com