Project Retrospective
Three terms of work have a shape: an arc, a few pivots, decisions that aged well and decisions that turned into interest payments. This retrospective is where your team writes that story down while everyone who lived it is still in the room. It is also the shared raw material each of you will mine for the individual Career and Individual Retrospective: write it well and the individual assignment gets easier for everyone.
Write 3 to 5 pages in docs/retrospectives/project.md (NDA teams submit a PDF export). The Retrospectives guide has prompts for the cross-year format.
Required Sections
Section titled “Required Sections”1. Arc and Pivots
Section titled “1. Arc and Pivots”The story of three terms as a narrative, not a term-by-term status list: what you set out to build in fall week 1, the three or four milestones that actually mattered, where momentum was strong and where it stalled, and each significant pivot or descope with what triggered it. Honesty about the pivots is the point; every real project has them.
2. Delivered Versus the Definition of Shipped
Section titled “2. Delivered Versus the Definition of Shipped”Put the final state next to your Definition of Shipped: the target rung, the metrics, and what was actually achieved (this should agree with your Release and Metrics numbers). Name the gap plainly and explain it. A well-explained gap reads as engineering judgment; a glossed-over one reads as spin.
3. Engineering Decisions and Their Consequences
Section titled “3. Engineering Decisions and Their Consequences”Pick 3 to 5 significant technical decisions from the year and trace each to its consequence: what it enabled, what debt it created, whether you would make it again. Link the RFCs and ADRs in docs/rfcs/ where the decisions were recorded; this is where the year’s paper trail pays off. At least one decision should be one that did not work out.
4. Team Dynamics
Section titled “4. Team Dynamics”How the team actually functioned across the year: how the rotating roles evolved, what communication patterns helped or hurt, how conflict was handled when it came (referencing the charter’s conflict path if you used it), and what this team knows about working together that it did not know in October.
5. For Whoever Continues the Work
Section titled “5. For Whoever Continues the Work”A forward-looking section addressed to the next owner, whether that is your partner, a future capstone team, or open-source maintainers: what they should understand about the architecture before touching anything, which risks in docs/risks.md are still live, and the first three things you would do next. This section feeds directly into the Project Handoff.
Include at least two lightweight artifacts across the document (a pivotal PR, a before-and-after diagram, a board snapshot), each with a caption saying why it matters.
Rubric (100 points)
Section titled “Rubric (100 points)”| Criterion | Points | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Arc and pivots: each term’s milestones dated and linked to their artifacts; each pivot names what was decided, when, and the evidence that prompted it | 20 | SO3 |
| Delivered versus shipped: specific, numbers-consistent comparison against the Definition of Shipped, gap explained | 20 | SO2 |
| Decisions and consequences: 3 to 5 decisions traced from RFC to outcome, honest about debt, at least one that did not pan out | 25 | SO6 |
| Team dynamics: role evolution, communication patterns, and conflict handled with critical honesty, tied to examples | 15 | SO5 |
Forward-looking section: names what a successor must understand first, links the live risks in docs/risks.md, and lists the first three actions to take |
10 | SO2 |
| Writing and evidence: structured, within length, at least two captioned artifacts | 10 | SO3 |
AI use: AI may help synthesize and draft from your own repo history, notes, and sprint records; that is a legitimate use of the paper trail you built. It must not invent events, soften consequences, or manufacture artifacts. Graders have read your sprint notes all year and will notice a story that does not match them.
Activities That Prepare This
Section titled “Activities That Prepare This”Your spring Team Health Assessment feeds the team-dynamics criterion, and Learning Journal entries from all three terms are what make the arc-and-pivots criterion possible to write honestly.
Browse reflective and teamwork when these run out.