principles of continuous improvement and agile retrospectives by vedran nikolic

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Introduction

• Special meeting where team gathers after completing an increment of work toinspect and adopt development methods and teamwork

• The process of retrospective is at the heart of Scrum (Inspect and Adapt), XP (fixit when it breaks) and Lean Software Development (Kaizen or ContinuousImprovement)

• Retrospective enables:

Whole team learning

Focuses not only on Dev process but also on the team and team issues

• Retrospective improves:

Productivity, capability, quality and capacity

• Team is empowered to make local decisions

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Retrospective steps

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Set the stage

• Helps to focus on work at hand, expalins the goal of of the session andcontributes to creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortablediscussing issues

• Try to establish values of your team as well as working agreements

• For example: XP teams are using simplicity, feedback, courage andrespect as their core team values

• Working agreements: meeting, respect, impediments, makecommitments as a team, incomplete stories are not good

Activities to Set The Stage: Check In, Focus On/Focus Off, ESVP

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Gather data

• Creates a shared picture of what happened

• The solving process begins by collecting observations, facts and

findings

• Inputs: events, metrics, stories completed

• Activities to Gather Data: Timeline, Triple Nickels

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The Timeline

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Generate insights

• Eveluate the data from the previous step and derive meaningful insights

from it

• It helps us understand the implications of our findings and discussions

• Activities to Generate Insight: Brainstorming (Free for All, Round Robin,

Quiet Writing), Five Why‘s, Fishbone Analysis

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Fishbone Analysis

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Decide what to do

• The last problem solving step where we have to decide what to do

about the problems we have identified

• We identify highest priority action items, detailed plans, and set

measurable goals

• Activities to decide what to do: short subjects (start doing, stop doing,

do more of, do less of...), SMART goals, circle of questions

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Close the retrospective

• The final steps, where we have an opportunity to reflect on what

happened during the meeting and express our appreciation to each

other

• We can also summarize what we have decided to keep or change, and

where we can make the best use of our time down the road

• Activities to close the retrospective: Plus/Delta, ROTI, appreciations

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Jean Tabaka self-assesement model

• Self-organization

• Empowered to make decisions

• Belief in vision and success

• Commited team

• Trust each other

• Participatory decision making

• Consensus-driven

• Constructive disagreement

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Length of the retrospective

• 2-hour session example:

1. Set the stage 6 min

2. Gather data 40 min

3. Generate insight 25 min

4. Decide what to do 20 min

5. Close the retrospective 20 min

No matter what the rule says, feel free to adjust the time according to your

needs and the problem you‘re faced with

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• Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great

• Retromat - Inspiration & plans for (agile) retrospectives

http://plans-for-retrospectives.com/

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Q&A

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