Let's Keep Retrospectives Engaging via Gamification

excella.com | @excellaco
Let’s Keep
Retrospectives
Engaging via
Gamification
Philip Rogers
Agile Coach

excella.com | @excellaco 2
• A Note about Gamification
• Retrospective Technique: Choose Five
• Choose Five Group Exercise
• Retrospective Technique: Retrospective from a Hat
• Q & A
• Resources
Agenda

• What do I mean by “gamification?”
• Introducing elements of “team-sourcing,” enabling team
members to choose from a range of options – and most
importantly, make retrospectives fun and engaging!
A Note About Gamification

Choose Five

Choose five adjectives that all start with the same letter of the
alphabet. Each of the words that you choose will serve as a
category for the team’s observations.
Tip: Choose a set of words that convey a range of emotions,
from positive to negative
Create as many sets of five adjectives as you can for
additional letters of the alphabet
Choose Five – Facilitator Preparation
V
Vibrant Vexing
Vague
Valorous
Versatile
S
Stupendous
Sad
Scary
Scintillating Superfluous
F
Funny Fuzzy Flawless
Fabulous Frustrating

1. Ask the team to choose a letter of the alphabet.
2. Reveal 5 words (categories) that start with the chosen letter
of the alphabet.
Let’s say they choose the letter “A,” and that your 5 pre-selected words starting with A are
Astounding | Awkward | Amusing | Annoying | Admirable
Note: Take a moment to make sure everybody understands the
meaning of each word.
3. (optional) Ask the team whether they want to keep that set
of 5 words (categories) or choose a different letter of the
alphabet.
Choose Five - Steps

4. Ask the team to silently write down observations that
fall into the 5 categories.
Example: If the team chose “A,” and one of the words (categories) is “admirable,” a team
member might write “When you helped me by finishing the coding on that user story when I was
not feeling well was admirable”
5. Ask the team to group their observations according to
the 5 categories.
6. Discuss the observations as a group.
You can go category by category, or team member by team member. Look for patterns.
7. Decide what happens next.
If you have an additional retrospective activity planned, help the team transition into that activity.
Otherwise, decide what might be actionable steps they can take based on what they have talked
about.
Choose Five – more steps

Choose Five – Sample Cards
B
Boring Beautiful Bellicose
Busy
Baffling
W
Wacky Wonderful Wearying
Wistful Wandering

Choose Five:
Group Exercise

Let’s Try Choose Five Together
Scenario:
We’re all members of the same Scrum Team. We’ve been
working together, on the same team, for about six months.
We’re on a two-week Sprint cadence, and we just finished a
difficult Sprint, where we had to push particularly hard to meet
what was an unrealistic deadline. We got the work done, and
there was a successful release to Production. However, we’re
all feeling drained after working long hours.
I’ll play the role of Scrum Master. The rest of us will self-select
a role, for the purposes of the exercise, as follows: Business
Analyst / UX / Developer / Tester /
Timebox for this exercise: 10 minutes

Let’s Try Choose Five Together
1. Let’s pick a letter of the alphabet (any letter other than
X, Y, or Z, for this demonstration).
2. I’ll reveal 5 words (categories) that start with the chosen
letter of the alphabet.
3. Based on the scenario described on the previous slide, and
whichever role you’ve decided to role-play:
• Silently write down three sentences, where each sentence
uses a different one of the words (it’s fine to write as if
you’re reliving an experience you’ve had in the past, even if
it only partially resembles the scenario)
4. I’ll ask for volunteers to read one of your sentences, and
we’ll discuss as a group what patterns we see, per category.

Retrospective
from a Hat

• Come up with a list of five to ten things that could potentially be
covered during a retrospective. Those “things” could be any of the
following:
• Retrospective exercises. Try to include exercises the team has tried before, or that
are easy to explain, if they are drawn from the “hat”.
• Topics. Topics could include things like follow-up items from the last retrospective, or hot-
button issues for that particular team.
• Questions. Ideally selected from a pre-prepared list of questions.
• Once you’ve decided on which things to include, write them on
separate note cards.
• Make sure you have a container to put the note cards in. If you have
an actual hat to use, great, but any container will do.
Retrospective from a Hat - Preparation

1. Show the team the hat (or other container) you have
decided to use.
Describe the nature of the things that are in the hat. Explain how many things
are to be drawn from the hat, and how much time is to be spent on each
thing.
2. Invite a team member to pick a thing from the hat.
3. Ask the team member to read the thing they chose.
Make sure everyone is clear on what the thing is and any guidelines
to keep in mind when talking about it.
4. Talk about the thing.
Retrospective from a Hat - Steps

5. Ask a different team member to draw a thing from the
hat.
Facilitate a conversation about that thing. Repeat this step until you run out
of time, everybody has drawn a thing, or you want to use a technique other
than retrospective from a hat.
6. Talk about “all the things.”
Invite the team to talk about the things that have been raised for far. Look for
patterns.
7. Decide what happens next.
Use facilitation techniques such as powerful questions, affinity mapping, and
dot voting to help the team converge on the outcomes most important to
them, and what actions they might want to take as a result of the
conversation.
Retrospective from a Hat – more steps

Q & A

Resources

• Choose Five
• The Fast and the Furious (and other F’s) retrospective
activity (Christo Martens):
https://www.tastycupcakes.org/2018/01/the-fast-and-the-furious-and-
other-fs-retrospective-activity/
• Retrospective from a Hat
• Tests from a Hat (Bill Wake)
https://xp123.com/articles/tests-from-a-hat/
Sources of Inspiration

https://medium.com/agile-outside-the-boxMy Blog

• Choose Five
• https://medium.com/agile-outside-the-box/using-gamification-to-keep-
retrospectives-fun-and-engaging-52c30c7fab8f
• Retrospective from a Hat
• https://medium.com/agile-outside-the-box/retrospective-from-a-hat-
2541c9d6b568
Blog Posts About Choose Five and
Retro from a Hat

https://trello.com/b/40BwQg57/retrospective-techniques-for-
coaches-scrum-masters-and-other-facilitators
Public Trello Board – Retrospective Techniques

A
Astounding Amusing Admirable Annoying Awkward Audacious Abnormal
Aggravating
B
Best Boring Bad Busy Bizarre Boisterous Baffling Beautiful Bellicose
C
Captivating Calm Crazy Cacophonous Confusing Cranky Cordial
Contentious Costly
D
Dazzling Dolorous Demanding Dramatic Dull Definitive Difficult Daunting
Distinctive
Choose Five – Sample Word List

Retrospective from a Hat – Sample
Questions
• If we were to describe the Sprint that ended with one
word, what would the word be?
• What words of appreciation/thanks do we have for
other team members?
• What were the hardest technical challenges that we
solved?
• The achievement we are most proud of is …
• Open forum—what topics do we want to make sure
we talk about today?
• What do we think our goals might be for the next
Sprint?

Where You Can Find Me Online
• https://medium.com/agile-outside-the-box
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gphiliprogers/
• https://twitter.com/g_philip
• https://trello.com/b/40BwQg57/retrospective-
techniques-for-coaches-scrum-masters-and-other-
facilitators

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