Retrospective

Attendees

• Scrum team

Process

Effective yet fun retrospectives

A retrospective is a great way to pause, take a breath, and look back at the previous sprint or period. To assess the current way of working in order to identify learnings and become an even better team. That being said, please don’t consider a retrospective to be a meeting only for highlighting things that need attention or improvement. It’s also the time to compliment each other.

The role of a Scrum Master

• Planning and facilitating the retrospective:
  • time-box
  • arrange rooms and necessities
• Makes sure everybody understands the goal of the retrospective.
• Comes up with the format.
• Documents and captures the process and action points.

Checklist

• Create a pleasant and open environment.
• Open the meeting with a short introduction.
• Discuss the status of the action points that came up in the previous meeting.
• Explain the type of retrospective you will execute. You facilitate and you make sure everyone has the space to discuss whatever they want to discuss — without going into detailed discussion.
• As a facilitator, dig deep and make sure that you understand the exact point a team member tries to make.
• You’re also responsible of time-boxing the meeting and making sure that the action points are written down and assigned to a team member. Create tickets if necessary.
• Ask the team how they thought this retrospective went (evaluate together).

Examples

We grouped our most effective yet fun retrospectives in the following categories:

A) Start of a Project
B) In Between
C) Mixing it up
D) End of a Project

The Classic (A)

Write a plus and a minus (or use emojis) on each end of the board and ask the team the question: “What went well (+) and what can we improve (-)?”.

The Food-Candy One (B)

Get a bag of your favourite yet different coloured type of candy (think M&Ms, Skittles or winegums). Make sure every color has a different ‘task’. For example:

• What went well & thus we should continue;
• What didn’t go well and thus we should stop with;
• New idea: implement ASAP;
• Activities we should do more;
• Activities we should do less.

Answer the statement of the color of your candy and enjoy!

Sailboat / Kite (A/D)

The team is represented by a boat, the boat is influenced by four factors:

• The island ahead is the goal or vision the team is heading towards;
• The wind blows in the sails and helps the team further;
• The anchor delays the team;
• The rocks are the risks ahead.

Newspaper Headlines

Let the team come up with headlines for their highs and lows of the previous sprint and provide visuals, add a section for future headliners.

TPRC (B)

Divide the board in four cross-sections: Team, Process, Result and Communication, divide each section with a plus and minus.

The A-team

As you might recall, there are four main characters in the old yet classic A-team series (can you name them by heart?)

• Face: visibility / results
• Murdock: particularities
• B.A.: group transport / collaboration
• Hannibal: future goals and plans

Add positive and negative points to each character, group them and discuss.

The Pizza (B)

Every slice is a question for the team to answer.

Which things should we...

• ...keep doing?
• ...do more?
• ...do less?
• ...start doing?
• ...stop with?

Side-note; this looks a lot like the Candy-one, however without the candy

Pro tips

• Let the team group the tickets.
• Ask ‘why’ five times to come to the core of a comment.
• Inform the team to think about some pointers according to the chosen methodology so the team is prepared and feels less put on the spot.
• Let the team assign a number (1–10) to evaluate the retrospective and jot down the average in the paper.
• Everyone is only ‘allowed’ to put three sticky notes on the wall, this ensures that the person prioritises the sticky notes which can make it easier time-box, especially when you want to execute retro’s in a larger group.
• Try and organise your retrospective outside of the office. Perfect for the Thursday afternoon?

Learn more

• The Christmas retrospective https://medium.com/@laurentfite/the-christmas-sprint-retrospective-38ecc843f81e