Retrospective meeting
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
- Two truths and a lie.
Gather data
- Present outcomes of previous improvement actions.
- Present standard data like:
- Average cycle or lead time.
- Average throughput.
- Predictability.
- Changes in team composition and/or availability.
- Create a timeline of the period under review; list the days of each week (Mon–Fri).
- Collect events that happened. This is neutral, objective data, e.g.
- Mon: start using the new server
- Tue: deployed five stories
- Wed: had a beer
- …
- Create three swim lanes as timeline
- Set tick marks for every day.
- Create four typical swim lanes:
- neutral :-|
- mad X-(
- sad :-(
- glad :-)
- Optional: add lanes for the other two emotions:
- afraid 8-[
- guilty ^_^;
- Collect facts & feelings: events and observations in appropriate swim lane, cluster at will.
Generate insights
- Create table with three columns:
- Good—behavior and practices you want to hone.
- Bad—behavior and practices you want to improve.
- Ugly—behavior and practices you want to stop.
Decide what to do
- Split table into top and bottom halves, thus creating six cells in total:
- Top: Me/We (within team's scope).
- Bottom half: They (beyond team's scope).
@Generate measurable actions and goals in each of the six cells. @Prioritize when
- Use the Good to try and fix the Bad and Ugly.
Close the retrospective
- Help, Hinder Hypothesis; or
- ROTI.
- +/Delta
Sources
- Agile Retrospectives—Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
- InfoQ » Shane Hastie » Linda Rising on Continuous Retrospectives
- 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?