[teampractices] Retrospectives

Tue Dec 10 01:04:16 UTC 2013

If I may add a few personal observations to the stack...

* The first few retrospectives you have, are going to be fascinatingly
awkward. Particularly so for established teams.
I've seen this happen several times, and heard tales of many more
situations that fit the same pattern: If any of the participants don't feel
like they have had an appropriate official venue in which to raise issues
until you get to the "What didn't work" part of your first retrospective,
the whole meeting will probably blow up. If I had to set up new retros
again, rather than try to time-box it to something reasonable (which would
end up shutting some people down) I'd give the first few retrospective
meetings about 3x the calendar time I'd want to regularly spend once the
situation settles into routine.

* Keeping at it is probably the easiest way to make it better.
Once the team gets used to having a retrospective, each individual's queue
of things to raise as issues will eventually empty (or at least stabilize).
This both shortens meetings (fewer issues to discuss), and ensures that all
the issues that are brought up, are relatively fresh. Fresh issues are
vastly preferable to stale ones: They will be relevant, and they won't have
had time to fester and become, well, awkward.

So basically, don't let the first few scare you off. It seems to me that it
always takes a few, to get the whole team to a place in which
retrospectives serve their intended function.
-Katie

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org>wrote:

>
> On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Tomasz Finc <tfinc at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> And if we haven't given you enough info. You can find all the notes
>> from the Mobile Apps team retrospectives on our team page
>>
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team
>>
>>
> Oo oo! And the mobile web team:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_web/Team
>
> --
> Arthur Richards
> Software Engineer, Mobile
> [[User:Awjrichards]]
> IRC: awjr
> +1-415-839-6885 x6687
>
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