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Agile retrospectives: Why, What and How

Dmitriy Viktorov

AgileDays’10, St.Petersburg, September 17th 2010

Postmortems in pre-Agile days

21 September,

2010

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When

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How to make retrospective successful

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Preparation

• Place

• Participants

• Agenda / goals

• Toolbox

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Conducting the retrospective

• Check in (warm-up)

• Collecting feedback

• Facilitation techniques

• Lead people, time, yourself

Check-in & Warm-up

• Get participants in the right mood

• Code of conduct

• Make agenda and goals visible

• Share context, display data,

timeline

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Project timeline (example)

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• 2 more sprints added

• Milestones:

• Beta 1 – the end of November,

• Beta 2 – the end of December,

• RC1 – the end of January,

• RC2 – the end of February,

• RTM – the mid/end of March

Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

Beta 1 RC1 RTMBeta 2 RC2

Sprint statistics (example)

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Sprint PBL items Capacity Work effort

# Total Done Undone SWE+QE Total Done Undone

S1 17 10 7 97.9 99 52 47

S2 17 13 4 94 90 60 30

S3 21 20 1 89.3 91 83 8

S4 16 14 2 123.2 122 85 37

S5 20 14 6 110.2 112 64 48

S6 17 10 7 91.2 97 60 37

S7 21 13 8 116.6 114 68 46

S8 10 7 3 80.5 57 38 19

• Statistics based on PBL data

Bug trend report (example)

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How to gather feedback

• Classic Scrum

• Starfish

• Keep, Drop, Fix, Try

• 3L’s (4L’s)

• Checklist

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Assessment form (example)

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Sprint 2

Sprint 7

Leading the retrospective

• Time

• Start and finish on time

• Timebox activities

• Have breaks

• People

• Personalities (quiet, overbeating, passive, aggressive)

• Introverts vs. extroverts

• You

• Facilitator vs. team member

• Let others talk

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Analyze feedback

• Group similar items

• Separate team and company level items

• Root cause analysis

• Select top 3/5/10 items to work on

• Discuss actions, owners and schedule

Group and separate items

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Group and separate items

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Group 1 Group 2 Group 3

Group 4 Group 5 Group 6

Group and separate items

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Group 6

Group 1

Group 5

Group 2

Group 4

Group 3

TEAM COMPANY

Root cause analysis

• Interview/questions

• 5 Why’s

• Fishbone

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Decide what, who and when

• Identify things that make difference

• Owner is not always the one who will do it

• Start with near-term improvements

• Get support for long-term improvements

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Closing the retrospective

• End in positive way

• Appreciation

• Celebrate (cake, champagne, fireworks)

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Follow up

• Share retrospective results

• Make comments and actions visible

• Add user stories, tasks to sprint/product backlog

• Check the status regularly

• Review on next retrospective

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Smells

• Reporting to management

• Offline retrospective (by email)

• Only a few participants

• Everybody is happy

• Blame game

• Nobody talks about elephant

• Looking for silver bullets

• Retrospective in the team room

• Too short retrospective meeting

• Facilitator doesn’t facilitate

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