What makes a failed Retro - Muon Nguyen

Retrospective – A Boring Meeting!?

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Agenda
• What is Retrospective
• Retrospective structure
• Common mistakes
• Tips and tricks to spice up your retrospectives
• Exercise

Retrospective - What
• A meeting that's held at the end of
each sprint.
• Reflects on what happened in the
sprint and identifies actions for
improvement in the next sprint.

Answer three questions:
• What went well during this sprint?
• What didn’t go so well during this sprint?
• What can we do better next time?
Retrospective - How

1) Setting the stage:
Facilitator presents a particular technique to be used, get team
comfortable/safe with the environment /setup working agreements
2) Gathering data:
Gather data/information from team by answer three questions above
3) Generating insights:
Step back and look at the picture the team has created. Use activities
that help people think together to discuss what was successful and
identify any roadblocks to success
Retrospective – How (structure)

4) Deciding what to do:
Prioritize the team's insights and choose a few improvements or
experiments that will make a difference for the team
5) Closing the retrospective:
Summarize how the team will follow up on plans and
commitments
Thank team members for their hard work. Conduct a little
retrospective on the retrospective
Retrospective – How (structure)

Development team
Retrospective – Who
Scrum master
Product Owner (mandatory?)

Unfortunately, we often hear people say that the event is boring and useless
BUT...

Same thing again and again
It’s boring...

No purpose
It’s boring...
• Discussions are distorted and
deviate away from the original intent
• No more valuable ideas for
improvement are found

Lack of fun
It’s boring...
• Complain (using Hilter’s way)
• Play the blame game
• Lose for focus in the retrospective

No improvement
It’s useless...
• Too many non-actionable
improvements
• Focus on what cannot be changed in
next sprint
• Lack of responsibility for ‘action plan’

Waste time
It’s useless...

IS IT TRUE?

Why do we have retrospectives?

Pause and sharpen the axe?Continue chopping?

Inspect
Adapt

Without retrospective
Three legs of scrum
No inspect and adapt
No Scrum

But… what to inspect?
& how to adapt?
& expected result?

• To observe how things are
going, remove obstacles and
improve things
• Team works together
• To become a high-
performance team
Inspect and adapt: what - how - why
[http://xprogramming.com]

But… How do we observe the right things?
& make the right choices?
& then improve as much as we want?
Or... How do we have a successful
retrospective?

Facilitation & have fun

Tip#1: Follow the retrospective structure
DO NOT SKIP
STEPS 1 & 5
!

Focus Goal
TimeboxAtmosphere

Review Retro of retro
AppreciationUpdate DoD
Closing the
Retrospecti
ve

• Change technique
• Change format
• Change place
• Change activity
Tip#2

Select a suitable activity for 5 steps
Tip#3

• Check-in
• Focus on / focus off
• ESVP
• Working Agreements
• Happiness radar
• Safety check
• ...
Activities to Set the stage

• Like to Like
• Team Radar
• Satisfaction Histogram
• Locate Strengths
• Mad Sad Glad
• Color Code Dots
• Timeline
• Triple Nickels
• ...
Activities to Gather data

• Brainstorming/Filtering
• Five Whys
• Learning Matrix
• Fishbone
• Patterns and Shifts
• Prioritize with Dots
• Report out with Synthesis
• ...
Activities to Generate insights

• SMART Goals
• Circle of Questions
• Short Subjects
• ...
Activities to Decide what to do

Activities to Close retrospective
• +/Delta
• Appreciations
• Temperature Reading
• Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis
• Return on Time Invested (ROTI)
• ...

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand
and truly believe that everyone did the best job
they could, given what they knew at the time,
their skills and abilities, the resources available,
and the situation at hand”
Norm Kerth
Tip#4 Follow the retrospective prime directive

Tip#5: Mange action plan after retrospective

[Agile Retrospectives- Esther Derby, Diana Larsen]

• Add to Definition of Done
• Paste to sprint improvement
• Check day-by-day
• Visit in next retrospective
• Have a physical backlog for actions

Tip#6: Being agile, NOT doing agile
• Don’t think: It’s a rule of the methodology and I have to follow it
• Change mine-set
• We are not perfect yet
• Responsibility

[agilemanifesto.org]

• Take meetings at work seriously and look very tense (not relaxed) in the
meetings
• Want to build personal trust with others outside of the office
• Think that we have the obligation to respect people who have a higher
position or are older than them. Difficult to have a cross-functional team
• Good topics for conversation are sports, travel, food, music, movies and
weather, But NOT working. Difficult to share information transparently
• Self-organization sounds far far away
Tip#7: Culture is counted
Vietnamese developers...

• The entire team is engaged.
• Discussion focuses on the team rather than on individuals.
• The team's Definition of Done is visited and (hopefully) expanded.
• A list of actionable commitments is created.
• The results of the previous sprint retrospective are visited.
• The discussion is relevant for all attendees.
Tip#8: Current trends and beyond to do retro

Instructions:
• Create team of ten, one is a Scrum master (SM), 1 chair for each team
member (except SM) + 1 empty chair
• The SM will start the timer and walk in the room trying to sit on the empty
chair (all other chairs have a team member sitting on it)
• The goal for the team is to prevent the SM from sitting on the empty chair
during 1 minute, by moving and sitting on the empty chair (each move leaves
an empty chair somewhere in the room)
No musical chairs
Exercise
[tastycupcakes.org/agilegames]

Rules:
• Team member could not touch the SM: holding, blocking, pushing … are
forbidden
• Team member HAS to move to an empty chair after standing up (a team
member could not sit on the same chair … even if the SM is close to them)
No musical chairs
Exercise

Iterations:
• When the SM wins, team has 1 minute time to do a retrospective to find
improvements.
• Try the new improvements
• Repeat the process … until the team find a winning strategy
No musical chairs
Exercise

What did you learn from the exercise?

KEEP
CAMP
AND
HAVE
A GOOD RETRO

Let’s do Retrospective for the event
5 minutes

• Agile Retrospectives- Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
• http://oredev.org/2014/sessions/retrospectives-are-boring-and-useless--or-are-they
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj620912.aspx
• http://retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
• https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2014/july/dos-and-don-ts-of-agile-retrospectives
• http://www.retrospectives.com/pages/retroPrimeDirective.html
• http://skycoach.be/category/continuous-improvement
References

What makes a failed Retro - Muon Nguyen

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