My previous blog post was about safe environment’s effects on retrospective meetings, after I published this post, I realized that I also wanted to write about retrospectives. So, here we are.
Retrospective meetings are one of the most important aspects of an agile environment. At the end of each sprint, the team gathers with or without a facilitator to criticize last iteration. This meeting aims to provide feedback to make the team better and ready for the upcoming sprints. An “agile” team without retrospective meetings will never be an agile team completely. Without the feedback gathered from retrospective meetings, the team will miss the opportunity for continuous improvement and will fall into the same pitfalls over and over again.
There are many ways to facilitate these meetings. A team can simply find a flipchart or a white board, and divide it to parts like Start, Stop, Continue. Afterwards the team members can place some stickers to each category according to the events of the last sprint. Then the team will be able to generate insights and actions from these stickers.
Having this meeting repetitively after each iteration will decrease the team’s excitement over time. This is where the facilitator shines. There are lots of ways to facilitate retrospective meetings. An efficient retrospective meeting has five different stages;
1. Set the Stage
This part works like an ice breaker. Sets up the team for feeling comfortable to share troubles and achievements. A team I have been had a thermometer to cross degrees according to how members felt about the last iteration. 100 °C meant extremely angry and 0 °C meant cool as cucumber.
2. Gather Data
This is where people start talking about the last iteration. They can simply have some stickers to write down events, or the facilitator might gamify this part. There might be a ship drawn in the board for the team to prevent from sunk or the members can create animals from Lego’s to represent how they feel.
3. Generating Ideas
People will start to talk about the data gathered from previous part. The team needs to come up with some similarities on how they feel about the events. They need to realize important issue or issues for them.
4. Decide What to Do
Teams without schedule or facilitator mostly skip this part. Talking about the issues is still good enough to create bonds between the members of the team, but without creating actions, the team will face the same problems over and over again. This will create disappointment for the retrospective meetings and will lead to failure.
After every meeting, the team should create actions to do for the next iteration in order to overcome the problems.
5. Tying A Bow on The Retrospective
After one or two hours of sharing, the team summarize the adventure by sharing some flowers with the members, or throwing balls and sharing what they learn.
There are lots of ways to facilitate retrospectives and there is a lot more to read about it. I paraphrased my experience with my learnings.
I especially want to share Lauren Moon’s Post about retrospectives. Also, I want to share Retromat, a tool helps to find different practices for the stages of a retrospective meeting.