Notes on Agile Retrospectives

I recently read (well, skimmed through) the book Agile Retrospectives - Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. The authors share lots of insight & experience on having retrospectives.

What is a retrospective? Quote from the book:

When we say retrospective, here's what we have in mind: a special meeting where the team gathers after completing an increment of work to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork.

Some benefits of retrospectives the authors have heard:

• Improved productivity
• Improved capability
• Improved quality
• Increased capacity

Typical structure for a retrospective

• (1) Set the stage
  • Welcomes & appreciation of people's time
  • Duration, goal & purpose of the retrospective
  • If the team has working agreementa, post and review them.
• (2) Gather data
  • Ask "What?"
• (3) Generate insights
  • Ask "Why?"
  • Think what to do differently.
• (4) Decide what to do
  • Plan experiments and actions
  • Pick only the top items (for an iteration retro, 1-2 could be enough)
  • Check out that people sign up and commit to the selected tasks.
• (5) Close the retro
  • Decide how to document what the team has learnt
  • Plan for follow-up

Tailoring a retrospective for your team - Planning the retro

Knowing the context

When preparing the retro, aim to have answers to the questions:

• What is the context of the team?
  • If you're working with your own team, you probably already know the history & context of your team-
  • If you're working with a team other than your own, study the context. (To get clues about what questions to ask and what challenges the team might have.)
• What's the goal for the retro?
• How long will the retro be?
• Where will the retro be hold?
  • A setup where everybody can see other people's faces is preferred.
  • Whiteboards for post-its, walls for timelines, flip charts etc.
• What's the structure of the retro?
  • How much time for the different phases?
  • If the retro is longer than two hours, remember to have break(s)

Selecting activities for the phases

Based on that you can select the activities for different phases.

• The book has a good selection of activities for each phase.
• The book author noted that ARCS criteria for evaluating instructional designs can be applied also for retro activities:
  • Attention
  • Relevance
  • Confidence/Competence (activities that the people can complete successfully)
  • Satisfaction
• As a tip, you can choose alternative activities (longer & shorter) to help with managing the time.

Leading a retro

• Facilitator vs. participant
  • As a facilitator your primary responsibility is the process.
  • Participants focus on the content, discuss and make the decisions.
• Managing the activities
  • As a tip, when using an activity for the first time, write a script for yourself.
  • If multiple parts, give the details for each part.
  • After giving instructions, ask for questions, pause and count to ten.
• Two main tasks during the activity:
  • Answer questions about the activity
  • Monitor the room
• Debriefing the activity, e.g. with the following:
  • Ask "What did you see and hear?"
  • Ask how people responded: "What surprised you? Where were you challenged?"
  • Ask for insight & analysis
  • Ask how could the insights be applied?
• Related to group dynamics:
  • Aim for everybody to participate. Make sure
    • People with something to say have the chance.
    • People with lots to say don't dominate.
  • After participating, next most common issues are violating the working agreements & blaming.
• If team become stuck, you can e.g. ask something like
  • What have we tried before? What happened? What would you like to happen differently?
  • If we had that, what would we gain?
  • Have you ever tried this a different way? What happened?
• Managing time
  • Have some timepiece to time activities etc.
• Managing you
  • If needed, remember to take a deep breath.
  • Take a break if needed
    • Shake out your hands & legs
    • Take three deep breaths to get oxygen to think clear

Activities for the different phases.

The authors have a good selection of activities for each phase. Please check out the book yourself.

In addition, here are some links to collections of retrospective activities etc.:

• http://www.funretrospectives.com/ - "Activities and ideas for making agile retrospectives more engaging"
• https://retromat.org - Generates a random plan with 1 activity for each phase
• Retrospective Techniques for Coaches, Scrum Masters, and Other Facilitators