Retrospective meeting

• retrospective prime directive

Retrospective Questions

• What went well?
• What can be improved?
• What have we learned?
• What do we still not know?
• What still puzzles us?
• What wishes do we have?
• Which single experiment will we do (to speed up)?
• What did this iteration produce?
• What was the team aiming for?
• How did the result meet (or not meet) expectations?
• What’s going on elsewhere in the organization that affects the team as they go into the retrospective?
  • For example, are there rumors of layoffs?
  • Has there been a recent merger?
  • A canceled product?
• What is the history of previous project reviews?
  • What happened?
  • What was the follow-up?
• What are the relationships between team members?
  • How is their work interdependent?
  • What are their personal connections and working relationships?
• What are team members feeling?
  • What are their concerns or anxieties?
  • What are they excited about?
• What kind of outcome will achieve value for the time invested— both for the retrospective sponsor and the team?
• How has the team worked with facilitators before?

Notes

Refreshing

• Also conduct retrospective meetings at other times than in between sprints.
• Consider to ‘good bad ugly’ them, and physically crushing the ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ after having collected them, and then ‘perfection game’ the ‘good’.
• tip top each other, just like a temperature reading. Top identifies something you value in the other. Tip is a request—petition, solicitation, prayer, desire—for specific behavior of the other.
• Turn the focus outward and ask yourself, “What can we give back to our environment?”

Alternative Retrospective

Pick two of these three key focal points in mind for every retrospective:

• speed;
• fun; and
• quality.

Set the stage

1. Two truths and a lie.

Gather data

1. Create three swim lanes as timeline, tick marks for every week; glad, neutral, sad are typical; you can also opt for the basic five emotions + neutral, so six swim lanes in total:
   • mad X-(
   • sad :-(
   • glad :-)
   • afraid 8-[
   • guilty ^_^;
   • neutral :-|
2. Collect events and observations in appropriate swim lane, cluster at will.

Generate insights

1. Create table with three columns:
   1. Good—behavior and practices you want to hone.
   2. Bad—behavior and practices you want to improve.
   3. Ugly—behavior and practices you want to stop.

Decide what to do

1. Split table into top and bottom halves, thus creating six cells in total:
   1. Top: Me/We (within team's scope).
   2. Bottom half: They (beyond team's scope).

@Generate measurable actions and goals in each of the six cells. @Prioritize when

1. Use the Good to try and fix the Bad and Ugly.

Close the retrospective

1. Help, Hinder Hypothesis; or
2. ROTI.
3. +/Delta

Sources

• Agile Retrospectives—Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
• Agile Cafe » Omar Bermudez » Story cubes: Build your story with cubes in the next retrospective
• Mastering the Obvious » Ellen Grove » Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin': Using Story Cubes to jazz up team retrospectives
• InfoQ » Ben Linders » Adding Purpose and Hypotheses to Agile Retrospectives
• InfoQ » Ben Linders » Having Actions Done from Retrospectives
• Target Process » Michael Dubakov » Development practice: Retrospectives in Kanban
• Seth’s Blog » Seth Godin » Self cleaning
• InfoQ » Luis Gonçalves, Ben Linders » Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives - A Toolbox of Retrospective Exercises
• InfoQ » Rui Miguel Ferreira » The Power of Anonymous Retrospectives ← must have its own anonymous retrospective
• LeanKit » Chris Hefley » How to Run Effective Standups and Retrospectives
• Seth’s Blog » Seth Godin » What’s next?