Agile Retrospectives: An Opportunity for Continuous Improvement

Agile Retrospectives: Agile has different frameworks, methodologies and practices under its umbrella. Out of which Retrospection is a key practice for team improvement with respect to people, process and product. 

WHAT is a Retrospective meeting?

•       Last activity in the sprint. Ideal duration for the retrospective meeting would be 3 Hours for 1 month iteration/sprint.

•       A retrospective is a team activity, where team members meet (preferred face to face) to understand their current process, discuss how it can be improved, and generate action items that can be acted on or before the next retrospective.

•       Frequent opportunity for team to inspect self and search for improvements, review and reflect

WHO would be part of it?

•       Development Team, Scrum Master and Product Owner

•       Strictly no stakeholders/managers

WHY Retrospection?

•       Improving process, How do we get better?

•       Learning from past mistakes

•       Celebrating accomplishments

•       Getting your team on the same page

•       To create a safe environment where team members can speak up and share their thoughts

•       To take inclusive decisions

•       Review Definition of Done (DoD)

•       Improving your work environment

•       Making good teams great

HOW to do a Retrospective meeting?

In the book “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” written by Esther derby and Diana Larsen, authors suggest a flexible framework to improve retrospectives

•       Set the stage.

•       Gather data.

•       Generate insights.

•       Decide what to do.

•       Close the retrospective.

Set the stage:

•       Facilitator establishes the focus for this retrospective

•       Share the plan for the meeting

•       Establish or re-purpose working agreements

•       Get every voice in the room

Gather Data:

•       Create a shared pool of data

•       Ground the retrospective in facts, not opinion

•       Consider objective and subjective experience

Generate Insights:

•       Understand systemic influences & root causes

•       Observe patterns

•       Move beyond habitual thinking

•       Build shared awareness

•       See system effects

Decide What to Do:

•       Move from discussion to action

•       Resolve on one or two actions or experiments

•       Focus on what the team can accomplish

•       Ask what the team has energy for, not what is “most important”

Close the retrospective:

•       Reiterate actions and follow-up

•       Appreciate contributions

•       Identify ways to make the next retrospective better

Retrospective meeting - Challenges:

·      Facilitator speaking more compared to the participants (Facilitation skill to be improved).

·      Facilitator not being judgmental, opinionated.

·      Creating psychologically safe environment for all the team members to speak up.

·      Discussions based on facts than assumptions.

·      Empower the team and take out tensions if any.

·      Getting team members active participation/involvement for team improvement.

·      Making retrospectives fun and interesting.

·      Facilitating retrospection by considering all personas, context of the team.

·      Coming up with meaningful action items.

·      Enabling team members to volunteer for owning the action items.

·      Team members blaming other team members.

·      Aligning the discussions with business interest.

Different Retrospective Techniques:

Facilitator should use different retrospective techniques to keep retrospectives fun, interesting and meaningful. There are many retrospectives available, let’s discuss some of the techniques we have used with our teams.

Star Fish/Wheel Retrospection

•       Start Doing

•       Stop Doing

•       Keep Doing

•       Do Less

•       Do More

 Well, not Well, Improvements

 Bollywood Style Retrospection

•       Hero- Keep Doing

•       Hero-ine: New Experiments

•       Comedian: Fun/Joy

•       Villain: Which stops you to continue

SCV Retrospection

•       The Supporter

•       The Critic

•       The Visionary

•       For more information: LINK

Sail Boat/Speed Boat Retrospection

•       WINDS: things that propel us

•       ANCHOR: things that are holding back

•       ICEBERG: Things to look out for (RISKS)

•       LIGHT: Improvements/Focus areas

Focus Retrospection

            Like, Dislike, Focus on Quality, Focus on Requirements

CAR Retrospection

            LIGHT: Focus Area

Brakes: Stopping us

Wheels: Helping us/Keep Doing

Smoke: Avoid/Stop doing

Like|Dislike, Challenges|Improvements 

4Ls Technique (Liked, Learned, Lacked and Longed for)

Impediments (Team and Organization Level)

Starbursting

STEP #1 –Starbursting

•       Variant of brainstorming, starbursting; While brainstorming churns out answers, starburstingis about coming up with questions.

•       ‘5Ws+1H’ –Who, When, Where, Why, What, How –one question per point. Then, get participants to write as many questions as they can think of for each category, and resist answering them at this stage.

STEP #2 –Three Questions

•       Review the questions together and pick the three most strategic questions to answer –questions whose answers are going to be absolutely key to solving the challenge. This round can be immensely powerful as it drives deep focus and alignment.

STEP #3 –Full Circle

•       Divide the team into three smaller groups where each will tackle one of the three strategic questions. To give everyone a chance to tackle each question, rotate each group to the next question after every twenty minutes or so, until all the groups have answered all three questions.

Football retrospection

            Key players

            Supporters

            Distractors

            Goals Scored

            Goals Given

Cricket Retrospection

            Boundaries

            Pitch

            Fielders

            Pavilion

            Cheer Leaders

CYNEFIN Retrospection

            I Loved

            I Liked

            I Don’t Like

            Please Stop

            I didn’t Understand

Six Thinking hats retrospection

            Blue-Process

            White-Facts

            Red-Feelings

            Green-Creativity

            Yellow-Benefits

            Black-Cautions

FLAP Retrospection

            F-Future Direction

            L-Lessons Learned

            A-Accomplishments

            P-Problem Areas

Retrospection-Focus on Scrum ceremonies

            Backlog Refinement

            Sprint Planning

            Daily Scrum

            Sprint Review

            Sprint Retrospection

Change | Implement

            3 things to Change

            3 things to Implement

Start, Stop and Improve

Mad, Sad and Glad

Open space Retrospection

•       Agenda is left to team members (It can be improvement or Focus areas or anything which is of concern)

•       Whatever discussion happens is the only thing that could have

•       When it’s over it’s over

Key Questions Rétrospective Technique

•       Our Biggest Constraint is

•       One thing I want to discuss in this retrospective is

•       One thing I am finding difficult is

•       One thing I don’t understand is

•       So far I have learned that

•       If I could change one thing right now, it would be…

•       We would collaborate better if we…

•       One difference between this and the best team I have worked in is…

•       How can we shorten our feedback loops?

•       Which of the company values are we following or not following?

These are some of the retrospective techniques, we have tried with teams working with. Thank you for taking time to read my blog. Please feel free to share your retrospective experience in comments and let the community know if you have got some innovative techniques to facilitate retrospectives.

References:

•       http://retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?title=Agile_Retrospective_Resource_Wiki

•       https://waynedgrant.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/sprint-retrospective-techniques/

•       “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” by Esther derby and Diana Larsen

•       CSM workshop conducted by Satisha Venkataramaiah (Leanpitch)

•       Nomad8 Blog