Visual Studio 2010 CTP 2 - Support for the Sprint Retrospective meeting?
Looking at the Light-Weight Process Template quick reference poster, step 7, we notice the retrospective meeting ... paging through the Visual Studio 2010 CTP2 walk-through document I noticed great support for this meeting, which we will briefly explore in this post.
Sprint Retrospective Meeting?
The retrospective meeting typically comes after the review meeting, during which the team demonstrated what was done ... preferably with a "visual" demonstration of a deliverable. While the demonstration during the review meeting is to show "what" was done, the 
retrospective meeting is focused on understanding "how" the sprint was done, what was good, bad, ugly and evil, and to discuss and formalise necessary changes for the next sprint.
I have yet to find a team that commits time to this meeting, other than adding it at the end of the sprint review and planning meetings agenda, as a possible point of discussion ... time permitting. I hope, that my colleague Zayd (our certified scrum master), will add his comments to this blog post, because I personally believe that this is one of the most important sprint meetings if the team wants to evolve, improve the scrum environment, increase productivity and at the same time team "happiness".
Visual Studio 2010 CTP2 "Retro" Artifacts
If we look at the Documents node of the "DinnerNow" team project and then scramble to the Samples and Templates node, we notice a mountain of sample documentation and templates. For those that have been looking for MSF templates ... well, here they are, just better!
The "Visual Studio 2010 CTP2 walk-through document" has a great lab to use these templates and to create a team wiki to collate some of the findings and practices. Make sure you get hold of the CTP, the walk-through document and that you complete some the guided walk-throughs.
The template "Document Template - Iteration Retrospective.dotx" delivers a great base template for teams that are willing to include the retrospective meeting in their scrum world.
The sample document "Document Template - Iteration Retrospective.docx" contains four pages of examples, that can be used by the teams not too sure what they should be discussing and documenting during the retrospective workshop.
The above may sound trivial, but is actually one of the many nuggets that you will find in the Team Foundation Server team project templates.
Download the CTP and explore some of these nugget mines!