James Carr

Lately we’ve been trying to improve our retrospective format, moving away from the as hoc “More Of, Same Of, Less Of” and into something more engaging and useful. For this goal, I’ve been applying the pattern outlined in the excellent Agile Retrospectives book:

1. Set The Stage
2. Gather Data
3. Generate Insights
4. Decide What To Do
5. Wrap Up

The initial feedback i got on Set The Stage was that it felt like a waste of time… this usually includes activities like asking participants what is one word they’re thinking of coming into the retrospective or other things to get them into focus mode. Since we’re pressed for time and didn’t get much value from this activity, we dropped it in favor of a just quick overview of the agenda.

Anyhow, after facilitating a few retrospectives using this format for my team, we branched out and tried it with other teams. The idea we’ve been having is to have someone from another team facilitate a team’s retrospective, allowing all members to participate rather than one being somewhat removed. This week I facilitated retrospectives for three teams, two of which had customers joining over teleconference from the other side of the country. The results were pretty interesting and below I have included my notes of the last two that I did.

Team One

The first team (which I’ll refer to as “team one”) posed quite a challange as they had in the past stated that they HATE retrospectives… they saw them as a waste of time and complained that even a 15 minute retrospective was too long. The retrospective lasted 40 minutes and 3 members complained they felt that we should’ve used more time… how ironic.
Format Used

• Gather Data: Satisfaction Histogram
• Generate Insights: Force Field Analysis
• Decide What To Do: S.M.A.R.T. Goals
• Wrap Up: Return On Time Invested

Retrospective Space Description
Meeting room with chairs formed in a semi-circle around a flip chart next to the main meeting table. I thought about moving the table against the wall, but think the close proximity helped people be more social. The funny thing was that as people came in, they darted for the table to sit down, as if it was another routine meeting. Telling them to come join us in the semi-circle as they did that kind of helped break down the meeting perception.

Comments

• Force Field Analysis went well, however I failed to make the group prioritize the items listed. When we moved on to create S.M.A.R.T. goals, the team had a slew of things to choose from to form goals over, but failed to form goals around the number one restraining factor listed.
• There was a missed discussion. after wrap up, someone spoke up about the major restraining factor and sparked a 5 to 10 minute discussion. Although it was good to discuss it, it would have been more meaningful if it had happened during the retrospective.
• People loved the format… someone who never participates during meetings not only participated, but was VERY vocal during discussions.

Looking back over this retrospective, I think that, as a facilitator, what i could have done better was to have everyone prioritize the Driving and Restraining factors to the top factor for them to develop a S.M.A.R.T. goal for the iteration. Secondly, don’t be afraid to tell a pair/group that their goal isn’t S.M.A.R.T!! I failed to do this and one of the goals were kind of lofty… asking them to try again might have helped.

Overall, it went great… the team commented that despite any of the failings they would prefer this format over the old format anyday.

Team Two

Team Two is interesting… because it’s my own team. We’d been doing Agile Retrospectives for five iterations now, so everyone was a bit more comfortable with it and adapted easily.

Format Used

• Gather Data: Iteration Time line
• Generate Insights: Patterns and Shifts
• Decide What To Do: Circle of Questions
• Wrap Up: Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis (HHH)

Retrospective Space Description
Training room was used. I facilitated at the back of the room in front a white board with a flip chart to the right of it describing each activity on a separate sheet, with a customer joining us over video conference on a screen at the opposite side of the room. Everyone was seated in a semi-circle in front of the white board.

The whiteboard was prepared before the session to be divided into three horizontal sections for different themes:

• Technical or Technology Related
• People or Team Related
• Organizational Related

Comments
This one went very very smoothly! I started with an overview of the agenda and a VERY brief description of each activity, and then broke everyone up into pairs to spend the next 5 minutes writing down on sticky cards as many events as they could think of that were significant or memorable during the iteration. At the end of the 5 minutes, I called everyone to put their sticky cards up on the board, and had someone capture our customer’s note cards down as well to transfer to the board.

Our customer tried to zoom in on the board, but unfortunately couldn’t zoom in enough for it to be visible. So, as a facilitator, I simply stood by the board and read out each event that was listed. From this point, we transitioned smoothly into Patterns and Shifts, in which I asked the team members to group together any events that are related and see if we could identify any patterns or interesting shifts. We all quickly organized the cards and wrote down about 10 to 14 patterns and shifts we noticed (for example, a few members noticed that a huge refactoring was done at the end of the iteration because we had succumbed to “Red, Green, On To The Next Thing” versus “Red, Green, Refactor”).

From this point I had everyone gather in a circle and described the Circle of Questions activity, starting the conversation off by sitting down and asking the person on my left “Why do you think the team held off on doing any refactoring until the end?” we continued in a circle, with someone asking a question to the person on their left, that person answering, and then the answerer turning to the person on their left and asking a related question (or new one). We continued around the circle twice, coming up with 3 solid goals… which we drilled down to one goal and 2 that we should “just always do it.”

We then wrapped the activity up with Helped, Hindered, and Hypothesis … which I included the team’s comments below:

• Helped
  • Really liked the timeline setup
  • The combination of activities worked GREAT
  • They liked that we addressed all events from the iteration
  • Got good, solid goals for the next iteration
• Hindered
  • Too many patterns = overwhelming
  • Circle of questions switched topics too often
  • Not sure that pairing was beneficial for the timeline
• Hypothesis
  • Faster pace for the circle of questions
  • Wanted a chance to praise others for their good work this iteration
  • Circle of Questions: Maybe after the person answers, allow everyone else to make a quick comment.

Overall, it went great… the customer was very enthusiastic and only complaint was being unable to see the timeline, but noted that it helped that we read it out to her. The team liked it a lot as it felt non-stop and covered a lot of ground in a very short time. i was very pleased with how this one turned out and hope to have similar retrospectives again!

That wraps it up for now… I have more retrospectives I could describe, but these are the last two that are the most recent and most fresh in my memory. I’ll post in the future about our Agile Retrospectives, especially since this upcoming month we are going to be having more people from other team help facilitate … allowing for full team involvement.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Agile Software Development, retrospectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.