Retrospective - heart of Scrum

Aleksej Šipulia

Me

Experienced Software Developer and

Agile Coach with a demonstrated

history of working in the financial

services industry. Skilled in Java,

Coaching, Agile Methodologies, Spring

and other. Strong engineering

professional and active leader of Java

community in Vilnius

People are too busy doing the REAL work!

http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

Retrospective

in principles

behind Agile

Manifesto

Scrum in a nutshell

Roles:

● Product Owner

● ScrumMaster

● Development Team

Ceremonies/meetings:

● Sprint planning

● Sprint demo/review

● Retrospective

● Daily scrum/standup

Artifacts:

● Product backlog

● Sprint backlog

● Burndown chart

● *Working agreement

● *Definition of Done

Prescriptive vs adaptive

What is Retrospective

● Goal? Continuous improvement in the team process

● What? The team inspects and adapts their process

● Who? The Product Owner (PO), Team and Scrum Master.

The SM facilitates (usually)

● When? At the end of each sprint, after the Sprint review.

In a retrospective, a team steps back, examines the way they

work, analyzes, and identify ways they can improve.

When to do a retrospective?

Retrospective structure

1. Set the stage

2. Gather data

3. Generate insights

4. Decide what to do

5. Close the retrospective

1 Stage: Set the stage - Purpose

● Create a good, safe environment

● Get every voice in the room

● Review accomplishment of actions decided on previous

retrospective

● Establish the focus for this retrospective

● Share the plan for the meeting

● Establish or re-purpose Retrospective working

agreements

1 Stage: Set the stage - Working Agreements

● Social contracts where the team members agree on how

they will work together during the retrospectives.

Examples:

● Avoid blame. Use “I” language rather than “You” or “They”

language when describing issues

● No personal attacks

● Focus on the problem, not on personalities

● Avoid interrupting others

1 Stage: Set the stage - Examples

1 Stage: Set the stage - Review experiments

Review accomplishment of main actions decided on

previous retrospectives

1 Stage: Set the stage - Examples

● Cat videos

● Ok, ok…. dog videos

● Funny viral video :)

● 1 word about previous sprint

● ...

2 Stage: Gather data - Purpose

● Create a shared pool of data

● Ground the retrospective in facts, not opinions

● Consider objective and subjective experience

● When? What How?

2 Stage: Gather data - Purpose

Gather each team member’s input on questions:

● What went well

● What could have been better

● Things to try

● Issues to escalate (to Management) etc.

2 Stage: Gather data - Examples

Pluses & minus/delta

2 Stage: Gather data - Examples

● Mad

● Sad

● Glad

2 Stage: Gather data - Examples

Starfish

● Keep doing

● More of

● Start doing

● Stop doing

● Less of

2 Stage: Gather data - Examples

4 L’s

● Liked

● Learned

● Lacked

● Longed for

2 Stage: Gather data - Examples

+/-/Ideas To try/Thank You

2 Stage: Gather data - Examples

3 Stage: Generate insights

Goals of stage 3 and 4

Root cause analysis

Root cause analysis

3 Stage: Generate insights - Purpose

● Understand systemic influences and root causes

● Observe patterns

● Move beyond habitual thinking

● See system effects

3 Stage: Generate insights - Purpose

● Group data

● Dot voting data clusters

● Drill down to root cause

3 Stage: Generate insights - issue drill down

5 Why

3 Stage: Generate insights

Dot voting

4 Stage: Decide what to do - Purpose

● Move from discussion to action

● Resolve on one or two actions or experiments

● Focus on what the team can accomplish

● Make a good balance between what the team has energy

for and what is most important

4 Stage: Decide what to do

● Use Dot Voting to prioritize action items

● Select most important 1-2 (max 3) items

● For each selected items write SMART (Specific, Measurable,

Achievable, Relevant, Timely) action items either to accomplish the

goal or take concrete steps toward it

● Ensure that those items are not forgotten Negotiate with

PO a budget of team hours/story points per sprint to be

used for process improvement

Metrics

?

Leading and lagging indicators

Leading indicator: as observable properties that would

indicate that we are getting closer to the defined Goal.

Leading indicators are probabilistic and may give false

results, and we therefore need a set of several leading

indicators that together give us a usable level of certainty.

Leading and lagging indicators

Lagging indicator: as observable properties that would

indicate that we are not getting away from an achieved Goal.

Lagging indicators are directly observable, but can only be

measured after the event.

4 Stage: Decide what to do

● Define very concrete Action Items (1-3)

● Assign responsible persons

● Experiment during one or two sprints

● Review results during next retrospective and decide if the

experiment was successful (and act accordingly)

Where to keep action items?

Sprint backlog vs. Separate experiment list

Success vs. failure

● If experiments succeeds - put it into working agreement or

definition of done and remove from experiment list / close

backlog item

● If it fails or it’s hard to measure progress remove it and

forget.

● Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn

5 Stage: Close the retrospective - Purpose

● Reiterate actions and follow-up

● Appreciate contributions

● Identify ways to make next iteration better

● Finish on positive note

5 Stage: Close the retrospective - Examples

Sources to get inspiration - Retromat

Sources to get inspiration - books

Other sources to get inspiration

● Ask Scrum Masters from other teams to facilitate a

retrospective – this brings new styles and new ideas

● Go to agile meetups

(https://www.meetup.com/AgileLietuva)

● Go to agile conferences

● Just google

Tips, tricks and ideas

● Proper retrospective vs. light retro

● Timeboxing the meeting

● Prepare for the retro

● Pick/switch location

● Sometimes swap facilitators

● Bring candy and chocolate

● Anti retro

● …

?