“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” A better example would be “Pair programming on Monday and Wednesday from 10:00 to 12:00”. What was the best moment during the iteration? Note : Learn more and sign up for a free 30 day trial of Geekbot to run asynchronous retrospectives, daily standups, and other remote work check-ins in Slack. In fact, I encourage you to make this fun! “Almost done, everyone! If they don’t feel comfortable answering the question, don’t make them. Now, if you’re like me, you might doubt the value of this exercise. Your email address will not be published. Remember, even though you have done the retro, it should not end there, make sure to create action items, or even review some of the action items in the subsequent retro and talk about what was done or not done. Force Field Analysis is a great way of identifying the factors that 1) support the topic (or drive the change forward), and 2) oppose the topic (or prohibit the change from happening). Here’s an example of 5 Whys in action, using baseball as an analogy. Use this phase of the retrospective to pick the right thing to work on so that your team can see the benefits of the retrospective. This is the fourth post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective. By taking a few minutes to set the stage before getting into the heart of the retrospective, the team has the chance to switch from thinking about the last thing they were working on to thinking about the bigger picture. There might be a combination of circumstances, which lead to your specific problem and therefore there are also multiple things you need to do in order to solve it. It is time set aside – outside of day-to-day routine – to reflect on past events and behaviors. Go!“. Retrospectives are essentially a post-mortem meeting with everyone involved on a project to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and to agree on actionable ways to improve for the next time. Use Retrium to allow people to submit ideas anonymously. And there's certainly more than one way to run a Retrospective. They immediately jump into trying to find solutions to that problem. There’s nothing like a good metaphor to host an effective retrospective and keep your team engaged, and that’s exactly what the sailboat retrospective does. Cindy took out her phone. She always seemed to speak first. Because Agile stresses the importance of continuous improvement, having a regular Agile retrospective is one of the most important of Agile development practices. Create new processes that replicate the last sprint’s wins and prevent the same problems from popping back up. Retrospectives are commonly used by agile software development teams to: Highlight opportunities for change Generate meaningful process improvements In this post we will take a closer look at some of the principles behind the method and why it works. But because of the one word check in activity, the team’s understood why Jeff was acting that way. Close your retrospective by asking participants: think about this year for a bit, and decide 3 personal actions for next year (what should … It’s all about Thor.”, There was a brief pause before Maya says, “Can I make a statement?“. It would remove the arguments. If you're a software engineer & looking for your next move, check us out. The retrospective is a meeting that takes place at the end of a sprint (a timeboxed iteration). Jordan nods his head and responds, “I never knew you enjoyed hiking. There is one more important thing, which you should keep in mind when creating your action items: Make clear to the team that you are dealing with complex problems here. If the team doesn’t feel safe, the retrospective will be useless. Additional Retrospective info and tips. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? etc”). Identify how to improve teamwork by reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and why. The Avengers movies are so much better!” Erica laughs, “You’re crazy. Running the Retro as a Gif exercise is more than just fun. “I was sure the lowest average rating was going to be on Managing Technical Debt, but that’s actually one of the highest!“. Now it’s time to analyze the data you’ve collected to discover insights and to find root causes. The sprint retrospective is a meeting where teams inspect the past sprint for improving work processes in the upcoming sprint. Take your insights and decide collectively what you’re going to do with them. Use this technique to help brainstorm a list of potential actions the team can take after it has identified an issue it wants to work on during Generating Insights. Then your team will be consistent in making sure that action items are always finished. Observe -> Orient -> Decide -> Act; That’s basically it. They simply want to come up with ideas for improvement. It guides you through the retrospective process. Everyone sat down and you could hear, see, and almost feel the groans in the room. Like with most of the other retrospective ideas, you’ll need to group similar themes and decide which ones should be actioned on in your next sprint. ‍Cindy, Joan, and Rahul aren’t paying attention. Make sure everyone says at least one word during this phase. Draw two columns on a whiteboard: Supporting Factors and Restraining Factors. Try all retrospective templates for 30 days, Get to know Retrium with a customized walk through, We're hiring! Use Start Stop Continue to propose actions the team can take to increase the strength of the supporting factor and decrease the strength of the inhibiting factor. But you can decide to give it a try for a couple of Sprints and measure its outcome. Randy disagrees and argues vehemently for trying out TDD. Go!“. To take 5 Whys to the next level, consider breaking your group into smaller subgroups of 2-4 people. Everything from the venue, to the TRUST needed for people to freely share. Retrospective . If you have too many action items it is likely that the team will forget about some of them. by Herbi | Scrum meetings, Sprint retrospective | 0 comments. Move tables and chairs out of the way. Close the retrospective with an appreciation for the hard work everyone did both during the iteration and during the retrospective. Everyone on the team comes up to the board and places their ideas onto the line. Then a Hackathon might be exactly, what can help you to get those ideas kick-started and …, Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great, Scrum Retrospective 5 – Close The Retrospective. Allow your team to determine what’s most important for their work going into your next iteration. Imagine if you hadn’t run 5 Whys. For those teams, it can be useful to start each retrospective with a review of the team’s Action Items from the previous retrospective. I bet you can think of a time when data was tracked without a clear purpose (“that’s just how we’ve done it in the past”). You can download an extract in PDF format here for free. Then Maya and John got into a disagreement that Erica thought didn’t even matter.‍. Decide what to do - Make sure the team decides together what is important and what is the most important thing for them to do. Don’t worry, if you’re not a baseball fan. Which activity during the retrospective was your favorite? Let’s go back to how we started: with the example team. These retrospectives don’t actually accomplish anything and I have so much to do.”, Bob, the team’s Scrum Master, kicked off the retro. If people on your team suspect that the data you are collecting is not only for The Team, but also for management, stakeholders, or anyone else not on The Team, they will no longer feel safe.‍. Then based on what you measure you can learn that this is a good solution and you keep it. And it wasn’t even hard to accomplish. The important thing is to make sure there is a shared understanding of what occurred. Lean Coffee™ is a way of constructing an agenda for the retrospective based on what the team collectively wants to discuss the most. You might ask “why” three times or eight. Set the Stage If you want people to be engaged and willing to work with you, it’s a good idea to take a moment to... 2. Take your time. 5. Instead, what matters is overall trends (“towards the beginning of the sprint, this happened. “Let’s spend some time analyzing Shared Coding Standards to see what’s truly going on,” says Bob. So many teams fall into the trap of Solution Finding before they know what problem they are trying to solve. Many teams make the mistake of ending the meeting before closing the feedback loop in this phase. As the team walks in, he asks everyone to join him in the middle of the room and he explains how he will start by making a statement and he’d like everyone to physically move closer or farther away from him to indicate their level of agreement with what he’s about to say. I felt like you really helped us as a team.”. If a team can run effective remote retrospectives, it will make it grow and improve its effectiveness when it comes to achieving tasks and creating value. At the end, Bob asks each of the volunteers to calculate the average for their set of sticky notes. Gathering Data is critical. And, stop. And Subjective Data is just as important as Objective Data! I am in the process of writing my first book about a fictional Scrum Team. We recommend running a retrospective with your team every couple of weeks or at the end of a project milestone. “The biggest problem to me is the low quality of the codebase. That’s when Bob draws another line onto the whiteboard, this time a vertical line half way down the middle. You want to make action items small enough so that they don´t have an impact on the amout of planned work for the upcoming Sprint. ), Issue: The Baltimore Orioles missed the playoffs. Bob says, “Next up, we’re going to run a Development Practices Radar. You can only imagine how the rest of the team is feeling. “Special meeting that takes place at the end of a period of work – usually an iteration or software release. Who committed which bugs and who fixed them? I will give you four reasons. They do them because “Scrum said to”. Do not share data outside The Team without permissionData can easily be abused and misused. As described in the Scrum Guide, the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness.. This way, not only do you avoid scheduling conflicts, but you also create a retrospective format that allows time for introspection and creates a culture of continuous improvement. “Here are the results,” says Bob. The second part of your retrospective review should focus on follow-up action. Setting the stage involves creating that “safe space”. Step 4: Decide what to do. When actions are presented as hypotheses, teams are less inclined to resist trying new things out (even if they don’t agree it’s the optimal experiment to run).‍, Here’s a template from Luís Gonçalves that you can use to write your Action Items as hypotheses:‍. After Phase 1—Setting The Stage we spend a considerable amount of time in Phase 2—Gather Data to identify the most crucial problems of the team. It was time for the team’s retrospective. Go!“. Additionally, you can use some “screaming” colors, like pink or orange, so that they stand out on the board. But not Jordan or Mike, who move as far away as possible. But a minority of teams simply see the retrospective as an “opportunity to complain”. For these people, Constellations is a fantastic exercise because it allows you to answer simple questions without speaking. When the votes are tallied, it turns out that the strongest driving force towards good quality Shared Coding Standards is the fact that by default everyone’s development environment is setup using a standard configuration. For instance, “Implementing 2-factor authentication for the web application” is too big for an action item of a Retrospective. ‍ There are tens if not hundreds of variations on how to properly facilitate each of these five phases of the retrospective (Set The Stage, Gather Data, Generate Insights, Decide What to Do, and Close the Retrospective). A retrospective is an opportunity to learn and improve. Ok, so at the end of this phase we have created a few, small, actionable items to improve our process. And only if you have really worked together in pairs for those two hours it is clear to everyone in the team that you can mark the action item as completed. During it, the team reflects on the main events that happened since the last meet-up and suggests improvement steps for the next cycle ahead.” By having two questions you give people the opportunity to choose, but you could also decide to just have one question of course. Most of the team excitedly moves very close to Maya. For teams that love to live in the digital world, this technique can be a fun Close The Retrospective activity. Immediately, a number of team members checked out. Generally time boxed to 1.5 hours for a 2 week Sprint. Also Know, how do you do a retrospective agile methodology? They are: Set the Stage Gather Data Generate Insights Decide What to Do Close the Retrospective Now that you’ve analyzed the issue at hand, it’s (finally) time to make it actionable. Who should attend the retrospective? 😲 How is that possible? Learning About the History and Environment; Shaping the Goal for the Retrospective; Determining Duration; Structuring a Retrospective; Selecting Activities; Chapter 3: Leading Retrospectives. At the end of that phase we had a list of subjects for further discussion. Use your imagination! Whenever you’re ready, put those factors up here on the whiteboard. Do any of these address the actual issue? Wrap up So, there you have it, how to do a retrospective. Thus, retrospectives are an effective way to do the short cycled improvement. If the action item requires a couple of days effort to be completed, then it is definitely too big. Without taking the time to Generate Insights, you might never have arrived at that conclusion. 5 Whys is a facilitation technique that helps you discover the root causes of an issue. On the left hand side of the line he writes the word “Low Impact” and on the right hand side of the line he writes the word “High Impact”. The Retrospective is generally the last event in a Scrum Sprint. 4. too many points to change. Here’s an example. Most teams naturally understand the need to Decide What To Do, even if they’ve never heard of the 5 phase approach to retrospectives. You can do this verbally or have everyone write down their response on a sticky note and hand them to you as they leave. Everyone waits to hear what’s next. An action that has high effort, low impact, and low energy, is likely one you should skip. Everyone organically splits into smaller subgroups. This framework will help you control the meeting, without dictating the conversations. Letters to the Future and The 4 Ls are also good exercises for starting this thought process. It is easy to remember 3 things, but it is a lot more difficult to remember 7 or even more things. Until now we have covered the first 3 phases. It gives everyone a chance to context switchRetrospectives require an entirely different mindset from the day-to-day grind of working on a product or project. If Jennifer had said, “I hypothesize that by implementing pair programming, the number of bugs in our upcoming iteration will be reduced. Set up a whiteboard in which the x-axis represents time. Here are some questions you can ask to gather Subjective Data: Alternatively, you can turn Subjective Data into measurable information. Objective Data is any information that can be measured and verified. You want to phrase your action item in a way that it is completely clear what needs to be done. Remove the need for documentation that needed to be kept up to date. For many people, this is the only part of the retrospective that seems natural because we want to jump in and solve problems. Generate Insights. “The best place to take vacation is the beach,” exclaims Maya. My bias, like many people with an engineering background, is to jump right into analyzing problems and finding solutions. Many teams have a retrospective ground rule: What Happens in the Retro Stays in the Retro. If you use Setting The Stage as an opportunity to have some fun, you’ll also grab their attention for the rest of the conversation. Discuss the results with the team. Consider running a retrospective about your retrospective process, to examine if it is serving you and give the team an opportunity to decide how to improve A Critical Component of Agile Success Retrospectives play a critical role as post-sprint milestones for any large-scale project. You can download an extract in PDF format for free by signing up to my email list below. Tell everyone to go find a gif that best represents the retrospective. What are some activities you can use to Gather Data? Use it as an opportunity to collect feedback in an effort to improve the retrospective experience next time. For example, you can use t-shirt sizes (small, medium, large, extra large) to compare each idea. Therefore I make sure that my team creates a maximum of 3 action items per Retrospective so we can keep the focus on the few most important items. In a Sprint Retrospective, we review the past Sprint and its events, intending to identify … What’s working against you? How To Run A Retrospective. Phrasing it like this does not tell you what you need to do exactly. By definition retrospective means “looking back or dealing with past events or situations”. For example, you might say: “Star Wars is better than Star Trek” or “Android is better than iOS” Not only will statements like these be fun and engaging, you might learn a thing or two about your teammates!‍. Organize a lean coffee to collect data during the retrospective. That’s the impact of Setting The Stage. This retrospective is leading nowhere good, and it only just began! But for teams that have people with strong opinions, that’s sometimes not enough.‍, Let’s think about this fictional scenario: the team is trying to decide which action to take in order to reduce the number of bugs produced in the upcoming iteration. Feel free to stop once you arrive at the root cause. Because Agile stresses the importance of continuous improvement, having a regular Agile retrospective is one of the most important of Agile development practices. What specifically went wrong in just the first few minutes? “Now, please self-organize into subgroups of 3-4 people. This tells you exactly what you need to do and when you need to do it. While there are lots of activities you can choose from, here are a few of my favorites: Ask all participants to answer a question using just a single word (feel free to change this to a single sentence, if you prefer). Scrum values time box’s. But I’d also add it includes manual testing,” Cindy responds. I’ll set another timebox of 5 minutes. JIRA is the perfect “Venue” to host your retrospectives since you already have all of the sprint information there. In one word, how are you feeling right now? There are a lot of different types of Objective Data. Ok, so you’ve Set The Stage to get everyone “checked in” and you’ve Gathered Data to build a shared understanding of the facts. Don’t fall into that trap. Decide What to Do; Close the Retrospective; Chapter 2: A Retrospective Custom-Fit to Your Team. Time boxing. Now we decide which action(s) the team thinks will be most effective for making small changes. Or you might measure bad results and decide to drop that solution, because it didn’t help to fix the problem. Before you end, take a few minutes to perform a retrospective on the retrospective. About ten years ago we had that crazy time …, You have great ideas, but there is no time nor money to work on those? Really. Therefore, it's now time to throw your retrospective word document template away and break free from the barriers of boring retrospective analysis strategies. Gather Data. The goal of this phase is to create action items to improve in the next iterations. JIRA is the perfect “Venue” to host your retrospectives since you already have all of the sprint information there. They can be a place to build and enable teams, or to help teams start their journey from the best possible place. Close - Appreciate peoples time and get feedback in terms of how to get better at retrospectives, both you as facilitator and the team. 5 means we’re doing as well as could be expected.“, Everyone thinks for a moment, then writes down their responses. These five stages are presented in the book Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. So many of you just commit code without thinking about how to make it better. “What I’d like for you to do next is to start brainstorming what the team can do to come to agreement on this. Jennifer argues passionately for trying out pair programming. When you’ve generated a list of potential actions, it can be difficult to know which one to work on next. But if the answer is “yes,” document what The Team has authorized to be discussed outside the room. For example, an action that has low effort, high impact, and high energy, would be a great candidate to commit to. Now that you have mapped out the Impact, Effort, and Energy of each potential action, the team can discuss which action makes the most sense. The power of retrospectives, Bob thought to himself. In the middle of the sprint, this happened. Now, we’re going to dive into more detail on this approach. Instead, bring the data that you think would be most interesting given the context of what’s going on. Here is an example: Use Retrium to keep people interested regardless of location. Ask people to answer one of the questions, one thing they learned or a thank you to someone. The worst? Now, let’s go on with Phase 4 and decide what we are going to do about the problem. This popular retrospective technique helps highlight your team’s emotions during the iteration (bringing to light Subjective Data exclusively). One option is to use the SMART template. What is one thing we could do better next retrospective? The importance of taking the time for retrospection comes from one of the 12 core principles of the Agile Manifesto. 4. The secret box can be any container into which team members just drop notes about things they would want to discuss in the retrospective. Retromat provides a lot of exercises for each of those stages. So, by making the action items visible to the team in different ways, you can do your best to make sure they will be worked on and completed until the end of the Sprint. 4. That’s when Closing The Retrospective with this activity makes sense.‍. More sticky notes are created and before long, the timebox is up. Maya was the first to speak up. Whether you’re new to the software development game or been a player for years, chances are you’ve participated in a sprint retrospective.If done well, these agile meetings can highlight opportunities for change, generate meaningful process improvements, and ultimately move the team in the right direction.If done poorly, a sprint retrospective can turn into a blame game or … Decide What to Do. The Scrum Team inspects how the last Sprint went with regards to individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and their Definition of Done. Therefore, it's now time to throw your retrospective word document template away and break free from the barriers of boring retrospective analysis strategies. That’s jumping into Solution Finding way too fast. The first phase of a retrospective is a chance for the team to “check in”. This means that even if it is completed it will not have a big impact. This is the fifth and last post of my blog post series about the five phases of a Scrum Retrospective. I learned this technique from Sven Winkler. The book tells the story of how the team is evolving from a mediocre-functioning group of people to a highly-efficient, self-organized team. They break down retrospectives into 5 stages: Set the Stage: an ice breaker activity helps teammates focus and get mentally ready for the retrospective. Congrats on making it to the end of the retrospective! Breaking into small subgroups can help encourage more people to participate in the discovery process. The process continues for each spoke of the Development Practices Radar. But it’s also critical to do it right. What if the team needs help on a particular issue from someone else in the organization? A retrospective is an opportunity to learn and improve. Don’t be afraid to move other ideas around so that we have a view into how impactful each idea is compared to the others.“. Your team will love this phase — fixing problems is what Solution Focused engineers want to do most. Be as specific as possible. Whereas a team might find 45 minutes suffice for one that was timeboxed to a week. Ok, that’s it for today. An example for a bad action item is “Improve team collaboration”. Create five columns on a poster board: Action Item, More Of, Less Of, Keep Doing, and Stop Doing. They were able to provide emotional support and the team felt closer to one another. Don’t tell the team that this is a fact! At the end of a Retrospective, everyone involved should decide on the action items that should be taken to improve future sprints. Why? For example, you could setup a Team Radar to ask your team how it is doing living up to the Scrum Values from 1 to 5 (1 being “poor” and 5 being “excellent”). Why? See you around, HabbediEhre! (Also this is not a real example: I’m not an expert on the Baltimore Orioles and the analysis here is made-up. They break down retrospectives into 5 stages: Set the Stage: an ice breaker activity helps teammates focus and get mentally ready for the retrospective. Jeff was usually a positive person who brought energy to any situation. In a retrospective, a team steps back, examines the way they work, analyses and identifies ways they can improve” Esther Derby 5. But which one of these solutions is the right one? Ergo, always start with an introductory period that focuses on the retrospective: setting the stage and the atmosphere for the rest of the discussion. For instance, imagine you have a big issue and you have an action item to tackle that problem. The retrospective is team-driven, and team members should decide together how the meetings will be run and how decisions will be made about improvements. Everyone looks at Bob. What patterns do you see? Retrospectives are essentially a post-mortem meeting with everyone involved on a project to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and to agree on actionable ways to improve for the next time. “Perfect. And the crazy thing is that the number of bugs in the code has been decreasing for months!“. During Set The Stage at that retrospective, the facilitator asked the group a one word check in question: “How are you feeling right now?” Everyone went around the table round-robin style. That means that the insights you discovered during the last phase of the retrospective must now be translated into Action Items or experiments so that the team has the opportunity to change. In Chapter 1, you learned the basics of an agile retrospective. “Great,” says Bob.