Weekly Engineering Retrospective (Retro)

Core Concepts / How It Works

The Retro skill analyzes the past week across three axes.

1. Commit History Analysis (What We Shipped)

• List of PRs merged this week, and the change volume (file count, line count) for each
• Ratio of feature additions, bug fixes, refactoring, documentation, and tests
• Deployed features that directly affect users vs. internal improvements

2. Work Pattern Analysis (How We Worked)

• Most frequently modified files/modules: hotspots where technical debt accumulates
• Commit time distribution: late-night work is a burnout signal
• PR cycle time: time elapsed from PR open to merge

3. Code Quality Trends (Quality Metrics)

• Increase/decrease in type errors and lint warnings
• Changes in test coverage
• Increase/decrease in code complexity (function size, nesting depth)

Team Awareness

Team member contributions are broken down individually, with two perspectives covered in balance:

• Praise: What went well this week, contributions to the team, difficult problems solved
• Growth Areas: Things that would be good to improve going forward, framed as development direction rather than criticism

The retrospective history accumulates continuously, enabling trend tracking. Insights like "test coverage has been declining for the past 3 weeks" are invisible from short-term retrospectives alone.

One-Line Summary

A weekly engineering retrospective skill that analyzes commit history, work patterns, and code quality metrics over a week (or sprint), and summarizes each team member's contributions as praise and growth areas.

Getting Started

/retro

SKILL.md location: ~/.claude/skills/retro/SKILL.md

To customize, copy the contents of SKILL.md and modify as needed.

Practical Example

Scenario: A 3-person team (team lead Minjun, frontend Seoyeon, backend Dohyeon) working on a Next.js 15 + TypeScript "Student Club Notice Board" project. The sprint ends Thursday night and the retrospective is held Friday morning.

# In a Claude Code session
> Run a retro for this week (2026-04-06 ~ 2026-04-12) using the retro skill.
> Team members: Minjun (minjun), Seoyeon (seoyeon), Dohyeon (dohyeon)

Example retro output

# Weekly Engineering Retrospective (2026-04-06 ~ 2026-04-12)

## What We Shipped
- **feat: notice creation feature** (PR #15, Seoyeon) — 12 files, +340/-28 lines
- **feat: notice detail page** (PR #16, Minjun) — 8 files, +210/-5 lines
- **fix: mobile layout broken** (PR #17, Seoyeon) — 2 files, +15/-8 lines
- **feat: Supabase RLS policy setup** (PR #18, Dohyeon) — 3 files, +90/-0 lines
- **chore: pnpm dependency update** (PR #19, Minjun) — 1 file, +5/-5 lines

Features 60% / Bug fixes 20% / Configuration 20% — healthy ratio

## Work Patterns
- Hotspot: `app/notices/` (68% of all commits this week)
  → Normal as notice features are in active development. However, component sizes
    in this folder are growing, so consider splitting them next week.
- Commit time distribution: Dohyeon concentrated 22:00–01:00 (watch for burnout)
- Average PR cycle time: 14 hours (target: under 8 hours)

## Code Quality
- TypeScript errors: 0 maintained ✅
- ESLint warnings: 3 → 1 (improved) ✅
- Test coverage: 42% → 38% (caution) ⚠️
  → Notice creation Server Action has no tests

## Individual Contributions

### Seoyeon (Frontend)
**Praise**: Implemented the notice creation form cleanly with React Hook Form + Zod,
and the error message UX is intuitive. Great work fixing the mobile bug quickly too.
**Growth Area**: NoticeForm component (240 lines) is growing.
Consider extracting the form logic into a Custom Hook next time.

Example retro history trend (3-week accumulation)

// Example of managing retro history as JSON (retro-history.json)
interface RetroWeek {
  week: string; // "2026-W15"
  testCoverage: number;
  lintWarnings: number;
  avgPrCycleHours: number;
  prCount: number;
}

const history: RetroWeek[] = [
  { week: "2026-W13", testCoverage: 52, lintWarnings: 5, avgPrCycleHours: 18, prCount: 3 },
  { week: "2026-W14", testCoverage: 42, lintWarnings: 3, avgPrCycleHours: 14, prCount: 5 },
  { week: "2026-W15", testCoverage: 38, lintWarnings: 1, avgPrCycleHours: 14, prCount: 5 },
];

// Trend: lint warnings are improving, but test coverage has been declining for 3 consecutive weeks
// → Top priority for next week: add tests

Learning Points / Common Pitfalls

• Retrospectives are not about assigning blame: It's not "why did Dohyeon work late?" but rather "if the late-night work pattern continues, there's a risk of burnout." The tone of a retrospective must always be aimed at growth for the entire team.
• Numbers need context: Test coverage at 38% could be good or bad. You need to consider whether it's "temporarily low due to a notice feature development sprint" or "a continuing downward trend."
• Common mistake — skipping the retrospective: The busier you are, the more likely retrospectives get skipped. But running hard in the wrong direction leads to wasting far more time later. A 30-minute retro can save 2–3 hours the following week.
• Next.js 15 tip: Adding Next.js-specific metrics like generateStaticParams, Server Action, and Server Component ratios to the retro items lets you periodically verify that the framework is being used correctly.
• gstack ecosystem tip: The retro skill works with the health skill for more precise tracking of code quality trends. It is recommended to take a snapshot of the current state with the health skill before running a retrospective.

Related Resources

• learn — Project learning management (session continuity)
• health — Codebase health check
• verification-before-completion — Pre-completion verification

---

Field	Value
Source URL	https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills
Author/Source	Anthropic
License	Commentary MIT, original for reference
Translation Date	2026-04-13