When a Scrum ceremony becomes a rage room, something has gone wrong. That was the realisation at Exante at the end of 2023, when the firm found its sprint retrospectives were producing plenty of complaints but no change. Teams vented for an hour, then raised identical grievances two weeks later.
According to Exante, the problem was twofold. There was no shared space to log issues as they occurred, forcing the team to dredge up two weeks of frustrations from memory. And once a problem was aired, there was no mechanism to resolve it. Meanwhile, genuinely broken processes went undiscussed, from lopsided release responsibilities falling entirely on QA engineers to critical knowledge living in individuals’ heads rather than documentation.
Exante’s response was to build what it calls a productive way to complain. A shared Miro board now captures pain points, wins and open questions in real time, so retrospectives start with a ready backlog. A resolution template ensures every complaint ends with an action item and a named owner. And the team stopped hunting for someone to blame, focusing instead on bottlenecks in the process, which made people far more willing to raise concerns.
The results were tangible. A hated Excel spreadsheet for tracking on-call rotations was replaced by a bot, which now runs the rota from a database, sends notifications and uses a random draw for unexpected cover. The bot proved so useful it spread to other teams as an internal product.
Release work, which involved more than ten mandatory steps and up to four hours per release, had historically fallen entirely on QA. Exante documented the procedure, shared ownership with developers and moved from fortnightly to weekly releases, cutting the workload per release. Grooming sessions were overhauled too, with deep task analysis and mandatory acceptance criteria, alongside shift-left practices in analysis and testing, delivering more predictable sprints.
The headline number is striking. Over two years, Exante cut production incidents by 76%, from 87 in 2022-2023 to 21 in 2024-2025, even as system complexity and release frequency grew. Critical SEV-1 and SEV-2 incidents are now in single digits.
For more, read the full story here.
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