What problem does it solve?
Unstructured, unproductive retrospectives often fail to capture actionable lessons or connect insights to future work, leading teams to repeat mistakes and miss improvement opportunities. This Skill automates a structured, blame-free retrospective workflow tailored for agile software development teams.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Automated Epic Discovery: Identifies the correct completed epic to review by checking sprint status files, with fallbacks to user input or story folder scanning if status data is missing.
- Cross-Story Pattern Analysis: Reviews all epic story records to surface recurring struggles, technical debt, review feedback, and breakthrough moments across the team's work.
- Retrospective Continuity: Checks previous epic retrospectives to track action item follow-through, lesson application, and process improvement effectiveness over time.
- Next Epic Preparation: Previews the upcoming epic to identify dependencies on completed work, technical prerequisites, and preparation gaps to reduce future blockers.
- Use Case: A team that just finished a 5-story user authentication epic can use this Skill to run a structured retro that surfaces database migration delays, verifies if last epic's documentation action items were completed, and flags needed API setup work for the next payment processing epic.
Quick Start
Use the bmad-retrospective skill to run a structured retrospective for your team's most recently completed epic and generate actionable, blame-free lessons for future work.
