Retro Lounge

The retro lounge collates all posts relating to agile retrospectives on this blog.

Theory and Practice

Retrospective starter exercises

Retrospective ideas
Scenario-based retrospective ideas
Retrospective outcomes


Further resources

  • Fun Retrospectives - activities and ideas for making agile retrospectives more engaging. Absolutey awesome resource. Jam packed with ideas for retrospectives, futurospectives, and team building 

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Agile Retrospective: Weather Report (20-30 minutes)

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Sometimes we can just ask our teams "how did it go?" But often, we can elicit more discussion by providing a conceptual framework to help answer that question.  This retrospective idea covers the set the stage and gather the data stages of the agile retrospective framework. As an extension to the exercise below, ask your team to dot-vote on ideas for further discussion, and based on this identify next steps. Setup Create four columns. At the head of each drawn four weather symbols depicting "Sunshine", "Cloudy with sunny intervals", "Cloudy with showers" and "Dark and Stormy". Set the scene Ask your team members to think about the sprint that has just finished. Which of the weather symbols best represents their feelings about how the sprint went.  Ask everyone to write their name on a post-it note, and then add it to the appropriate column on the board. Once everyone has put down their post-it notes, ask everyone to say just a few sente...
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Book Chapter Summary | Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (New York, 2014) by Jeff Sutherland - Chapter One: The Way the World Works is Broken

Chapter One: The Way the World Works is Broken Traditional management approaches have repeatedly failed to deliver big technology projects. Scrum is proven to help such projects deliver more stuff with higher quality at lower cost with fewer people and in less time. Quick Summary Planning is useful, but plans fall apart so assume you'll need to be flexible You're toast if your organisation doesn't change its traditional "command and control" management Fail fast and learn from mistakes - get user feedback early so you can immediately eliminate any wasted effort Main Points The world is constantly getting more complicated, and the work we do along with it. Whenever people are involved in a complex, creative effort traditional management methods break apart. Scrum brings teams together to create great things. That involves everyone understanding the end goal, and delivering incrementally towards that goal. Too much of life is wasted on work that you and your boss re...
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Agile Retrospective: minimise disruption on an agile team when a team member leaves (30 - 45 minutes)

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Staff turnover is a fact of life for all teams, including agile teams.  A departing team member can turn out to be a blow, or a blessing, or anything in between. What is certain is that it will cause some disruption.  The team may also need to go through a phase of re-forming and storming, as per Tuckman's stages of group development model . Whatever happens with team dynamics, in the short term we can plan for a team members departure by making sure that s/he doesn't leave a knowledge gap in the team. It's common for team members to become more expert in certain areas of the project or product that their team mates. Even if approaches such as pair programming can minimise this impact. For example, one team member may take on the responsibility of releasing code through the delivery pipeline. Even if this process is well documented there are often quirks that  an expert would do automatically without referring to documentation (or taking the time to document the quirk). S...
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