45 Sprint Retrospective Jokes
Retro is the meeting where we agree to do better and then do exactly the same thing.
"What went well." Silence. "Okay, moving on."
Start. Stop. Continue. Nothing started. Nothing stopped. Everything continued.
"This is a safe space." Management is in the room.
Every retro has the one person who only writes "too many meetings."
The action item from last retro: too many meetings. The meeting count this sprint: up.
"Who wants to own this action item." The same person again.
Retro icebreakers are the longest part of retro.
"Share a song that captures your sprint." It is going to be a long hour.
"Anonymous sticky notes." Everyone knows whose handwriting that is.
The Mad Sad Glad board. Mad column: full. Glad column: empty.
"Let's group similar themes." They are all the same theme.
"Anyone want to add to the board." Three minutes of silent typing. No new cards.
Every retro produces an action item. Every action item never gets done. Next retro: the same action item.
"Why did this not get done last sprint." "Too many meetings."
The retro tool ate the cards three minutes before the meeting ended.
"Did anyone screenshot the board." Nobody did.
"This was a long sprint." It was the same length as every other sprint.
"Can we shorten retro." The action item: add a meeting to discuss shortening retro.
Every retro has the moment where the team finally says the real problem. The scrum master writes: "Communication."
"What would you do differently." "Not be here."
The team voted to try a new retro format. The new format: the old format with different colours.
"Let's dot-vote." Everyone votes for the same card. The card is "too many meetings."
"What blocked us this sprint." The blockers raised in standup that nobody followed up on.
Retro is the only place psychological safety gets discussed and never demonstrated.
"Let's hear from the quiet voices." The quiet voices remain quiet.
"We are improving as a team." Velocity: flat for two years.
The action item: "Improve documentation." The owner: "Team." The due date: blank.
"Did we close the action items from last retro." Nobody can find last retro.
Every retro at every company eventually produces the action item: "Have fewer meetings."
It does not work.
"What did we learn this sprint." "Estimates are still wrong."
"Can we start retro on time." "That is on the agenda for next retro."
The new retro facilitator made everyone draw their feelings. Three resignations followed.
"Let's appreciate someone on the team." Everyone appreciates the person on vacation.
"This is the last retro of the quarter." It looks identical to the first one.
Action item: "Refine acceptance criteria earlier." Sprint after sprint after sprint.
"Who wants to facilitate next time." The same volunteer. They always volunteer. They are tired.
"Sprint went well." The demo had three bugs and a rollback.
"Anything we want to celebrate." It is Thursday. The sprint shipped a config change.
The retro lasted 90 minutes. The action items came to four lines.
"Anything we want to flag to leadership." A list of fourteen things. The flag email never gets sent.
"Same time next sprint." The calendar invite is recurring forever.
The retro retrospective is when I sit alone after retro wondering what I just did with my afternoon.
"Continuous improvement." The continuous part is doing fine.
Why retrospective humour keeps repeating itself
The Scrum Guide describes the sprint retrospective as the team's opportunity to "inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next sprint." The book the entire ceremony is built on — Esther Derby and Diana Larsen's Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great — runs roughly 200 pages of carefully designed activities to get teams past surface complaints and into structural change. None of that survives the actual meeting most teams hold. Most retros are the same Start-Stop-Continue board, the same handful of complaints, the same action item nobody owns, every two weeks, for years.
The reason the same jokes keep working is that the same patterns keep repeating. The action item "too many meetings" appears in retro after retro because adding a fortnightly retro to discuss having too many meetings does not reduce the meeting count. The action item "improve documentation" gets owned by "the team" because nobody on the team wants to own it personally. The Mad-Sad-Glad board fills up the Mad column because the Glad column requires people to remember good things from a sprint that ended an hour ago, and the bad things are still emotionally fresh.
The retro is also the meeting that exposes how much of agile is a question of organisational culture. A team in a high-trust environment uses retro to surface real structural problems and watches them get fixed quarter over quarter. A team in a low-trust environment uses retro to vent, watches nothing get fixed, and learns to stop venting. The framework is the same. The outcome is entirely upstream. Most of the jokes in this article are jokes about the second team. The first team exists. I have not seen one in a while.
See also
- 85 Agile and Scrum Jokes Every Scrum Team Knows: the wider ceremony set retro lives inside.
- 50 Sprint Planning Jokes for the Meeting That Refines Nothing: the meeting on the other end of the sprint.
- 60 Jira Ticket Jokes for People Living in the Backlog: where the action items get filed and quietly forgotten.
- 55 Scrum Master Jokes for People Who Schedule the Meetings: the facilitator running retro this fortnight.
- 50 Agile Coach Jokes for Teams That Have Been Coached: the consultant who suggested the new retro format last quarter.
- 40 Project Manager Jokes Every PM Has Lived Through: the role inheriting every unowned action item.
- 50 Quick Call Jokes for the Meeting That Was Not Quick: the follow-up booked to discuss the retro action items.
Sources
Authoritative references this article was fact-checked against.