Retrospectives Advices

Agile Retrospectives. Advices

From the materials of a two-day class run by SCRUMguides on the subject of “Agile Adoption with SCRUM”

Agile Gathering IV, Kyiv, 05 April 2008

Agile Retrospectives ©SCRUMguides2

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

The AgileManifesto claims this to be one of the four main values of Agile

What does it mean?What should it mean to us?


Teams and Methodologies

Methodology is defined as "a particular procedure orset of procedures“ Merriam-Webster dictionary

We know Waterfall, Spiral, RUP, CMM-(I), XP, SCRUM… - all of these are different ways of doing software development.

And all of them have success and failure stories.

Why?


Why all methodologies have succeeded and failed?

Because

It is people who apply them, and people might succeed and fail.

All situations are unique so it is easy to misapply a tool.

“There is no a silver bullet!” © Fred Brooks

Surprised?


Now what can we do about?

1. We can study each methodology in details and define criteria to know when to apply each.

2. Or we can start from any methodology and rely on the ability of people to learn from their experience and make corrections.

This is what Agile Manifesto authors seems to mean under the “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”


Winnie the Pooh on Retrospectives

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and thinkof it”.


Retrospectives and Traditional Project Management

The term "Retrospective" was coined by Norman Kerth author of "Project Retrospectives: a handbook for team reviews".

Such retrospectives are sometimes called “post-mortems”(scary stuff)


Retrospectives and Agile

It seems a pity to wait until the end of a project to start uncovering lessons learned!

We can inspect and adapt through the life of the project.

Iterative-incremental approach (e.g. SCRUM) provides the framework for doing this.


Retrospective Is …

Retrospectives are meetings that get the whole team involved in the review of past events and brainstorming ideas for working more effectively going forward. Actions for applying lessons learned are developed for the team by the team.


Retrospectives and XP, SCRUM

In 2001, Extreme Programming teams adapted retrospectives to fit within an iterative development cycle.

Alistair Cockburn describes “reflection workshops” in his family of Crystal methodologies (mid- and post-iteration retrospectives).

In Scrum retrospective is a mandatory practice done after the demo and before the next sprint planning.


A survey

Do you do retrospectives in your team(s)?

Do you do them regularly?

Was it a useful practice?


Discuss:1) What went right?2) What went wrong?3) What can we improve the nextiteration?

The findings are shared with the project’s stakeholders.

Retrospective “By the Book”


To Have a Good Retrospective You Need an Agenda and a Facilitator

Like any productive meeting, a retrospective needs a clear agenda and a facilitator to keep the meeting running smoothly.

Without these in place, conversations are likely to be full of criticism and attributing blame.


Now finally some advices!


Make sure everyone is comfortable speaking

If the majority is not going to participate – you likely to get nothing out of the session.

Fix the safety of your environment so that people don’t feel concerned about that.


Make sure you give everyone a chance to say one word before it starts

Start with asking everyone something stupid like “What is your mood today?”.

If people had a chance to say “good”, “bad”, or “ok”they will likely speak during the session.

Otherwise it will be you speaking (and making the decisions). Is that what you want? ☺


Avoid blame

“Learning ends when we start seeking blame.”

So make sure everyone understands the goal of the meeting which is to learn from the past and generate new knowledge to guide the team in building a better process.


Gather data with the team

You need to help the team see the good things, issues, patterns happening in the project to be able to make decisions.

One way to do this is to use a timeline exercise.


Help the team generate the ideas


Help the team build an action plan

For the most important problems (2-3) define a long-term goaland a short-term action (“now-action”)

Long-term goal: Have test automation on acceptance-test level

Now-Action:Pete will automate one test using Fit

It is the short-term action you will plan to do before the next retrospective

Read more about this at ScrumAlliance, article by Bas Vodde


Make sure you don’t forget plan for the time

All tasks take time.

If you forget to leave time in iteration for the team to work on retrospective action items –don’t hope for magic.

After this is done regularly for several iterations, your team’s velocity will accommodate it.


Link retrospectives

Don’t forget to review the “now-actions” from the previous retrospective and decide what to do.

There is no point in making retrospectives if no actions are done!


Don’t make it distributed

Distributed retrospectives hardly work.

Make them in your local team, in your local language.

Share your findings with the World.


Don’t make it same all the time

If you do the ceremony all the same all times people just can get bored.

So improvise!


Do retrospectives. Regularly.

If you do them regularly, they will become a natural heart-beat for your team


Thank you! Questions?

Business

Retrospectives Advices