[teampractices] Retrospectives

Tue Dec 10 00:43:00 UTC 2013

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon at wikimedia.org>wrote:

>
> I'll suggest you do a retrospective for every sprint.  These
> retrospectives should have three aspects:
>
> What went well:  celebrate your successes, you deserve it.
> What did not go well: make a list of issues encountered during the last
> sprint
> What to improve:  this is where it gets interesting...
>

Mobile web has followed this format since we organized as an agile team,
and personally I find it to be really useful. It's super lightweight and
just enough structure.

I've been curious about trying out other approaches, as in some ways the
formula has started to feel a little dry and, well, formulaic, but we
haven't tried anything else out.

>
> Take the list of things that did not go well and prepare to vote on them.
>  Everyone on the team gets some number of votes, 3 or 5 or whatever.
>  Everyone on the team can distribute their votes for improvement among the
> list of issues to be improved.  After voting, the top few issues (3 might
> be a good number) get assigned to some person, by volunteering, by the
> Scrum Master, by some mechanism. That person may not be the one to fix the
> issue, but that person is the one that shepherds the fixing and moves the
> fixing of the issue along.
>

This is a really important point and I think this can make a real
difference between a valuable retrospective and a total snoozefest. On the
mobile web team, we chat super briefly about the things that didn't work -
just enough so that everyone has some idea of the pain point. Then we speak
more in-depth about the things the majority of folks feel are important. If
we didn't do it this way and instead just spoke through all the negative
things, we likely wouldn't get through all of it, and we'd likely spend a
bunch of time on things that aren't as important for the team to address as
a whole.

There's a great book out on the subject of retrospectives, and it's worth a
read:
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retrospectives-Making-Teams-Great/dp/0977616649

-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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