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Retrospectives

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Running retrospectives — Government Service Design Manual. A central principle of agile is quick feedback loops – you demonstrate something to the user as soon as possible so you can see how well it suits their needs.

Running retrospectives — Government Service Design Manual

Retrospectives are the way we apply this to our own teams to find out what’s working and what isn’t, so a team can continuously improve. Retrospectives A retrospective is a meeting at the end of a sprint where your team get a chance to talk about what went well and badly in that sprint, and take some actions to improve matters. It can also cover a larger scope, eg a full project retrospective. A retrospective takes this form: gather data generate insights decide what to do This is a chance for everyone in your team to contribute to improving process/productivity. The facilitator All retrospectives must be facilitated.

At the same time, they make sure the meeting remains a structured, productive meeting and doesn’t become overly negative. The facilitator needs to: Working agreements. Iteration Retrospective Activity: Turn the Tables. Introduction One of the biggest challenges of a ScrumMaster is to conduct retrospectives.

Iteration Retrospective Activity: Turn the Tables

Running one retrospective is easy: Every conscientious ScrumMaster most likely has read the retrospective bible, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen (and if you haven't, I highly recommend that you do so straightaway). So you just need to follow the guidelines and your retrospective will go smoothly. Right? However, if you have, as most people do, two-week iterations, you will hold, more or less, 20 retrospectives in a year. In this article, I will present a concrete exercise that will, I hope, boost your next retrospective.

Set the stage.Gather data.Generate insights.Decide what to do.Close the retrospective. "Turn the tables" will mainly stand out in phase 2 (gather data) and phase 3 (generate insights), by coming up with an original idea. Turn the tables. Generate insights. Agile game: backward retrospective « graphility. This is a game I came up with during some of our internal projects.

Agile game: backward retrospective « graphility

I call it the backward retrospective, for it uses the creative visualization to empower your workflow. At the beginning of a project, before you start anything, imagine for a moment that the project has ended. Instead of planning iteration 0, you are in fact gathered to wrap up the project retrospective. Now, ask yourself how would you like this retrospective to sound like. In other words, how would you like your project to end? Obviously, we all want a successful project! During iteration reviews, use the objective the whole team has set as a benchmark. This game has the advantage of letting the whole team imagine the project’s end.

Agile Retrospectives. Patterns for Iteration Retrospectives. Some goals of retrospectives: Build a safe environmentBuild trust and participationAppreciate successesProvide a framework for improvementCatharsisFace issuesSet team "rules": create and evolve the team’s process The organization of these patterns: Overall Iteration Retrospectives (1)Safety Safe Space (2)Bag Check (3)Anonymous Responses (4)Open Format (5)Language Safety Blanket (6)Reframing (7)Structure Backward and Forward Look (8)Deeper Dig (9)Fish in Water (10)Facilitator’s Toolbox (11)Change in Pace (12)Outcomes Tentative Rules (13)SMART Goals (14)Smaller Bites (15) It’s risky to say certain truths aloud.

Patterns for Iteration Retrospectives

A retrospective needs to take that into account. The way people discuss things can reveal things about a situation. These patterns consider the structure of the retrospective, and ways to explore what the team thinks. Adoption of Agile Developmentwww.adoptionofagile.com: More Effective Retrospectives With The W.Ack.Hm White Board. Regular re-occurring retrospectives DURING the course of the project is a key reason why Agile helps make projects successful.

Adoption of Agile Developmentwww.adoptionofagile.com: More Effective Retrospectives With The W.Ack.Hm White Board

Why wait until the end of a project to learn what worked well and what could have been improved when you can adjust things during the course of the project? Project "post-mortems" held only at the END of a project should be a practice that dies along with its morbid name! But, no matter what approach I took for the retrospective, I ran into one nagging problem... people seemed to struggle to remember what happened during the last iteration. Or, if they did recall anything, it was usually much more of the negative rather than the positive. An effective retrospective should highlight and celebrate our successes as much as our failures - so it was of little help when people would only remember the failures! So - soon after starting up my latest project, I decided to try to tackle this critical problem. Enter the W.Ack.Hm (pronounced "Whack'em! ") 1. Main Page - Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki. 6 Thinking Hats Retrospective - Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki.

Use: You can read about De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats on Wikipedia where it is described as “a thinking tool for group discussion and individual thinking.

6 Thinking Hats Retrospective - Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki

Combined with the idea of parallel thinking which is associated with it, it provides a means for groups to think together more effectively, and a means to plan thinking processes in a detailed and cohesive way”. Length of time: Approximately 60 minutes but can easily be tailored to need. Questions Retrospective - Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki. Use: A retrospective for a short iteration Length Of time: 1 hour.

Questions Retrospective - Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki

Retrospective Plans - Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki.