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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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: 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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Agile Retrospective: celebrating success (30 mins)

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Working on a project or product can feel like a slog. Like it or not, whatever we do to clear blockers and spice things up, scrum can feel like an uphill struggle. We finish one sprint, and start a new one, taking another slice of stories from the unrelenting product backlog. As Scrum Masters, it's part of our role to be unrelentingly positive and optimistic. To celebrate achievements and call out good practice.  So, in this retrospective idea I'm suggesting something a little different. The idea is not to identify a way to improve. Unlike most retrospectives, the purpose of this retro is a mood booster. It gives your teams an opportunity to reflect on what they enjoy, what's going well, and what they've already achieved. Setup Create a 4x4 grid containing the quadrant titles "Achievements", "Teamwork", "Compliments" and "Things I've learned" Around the grid, give everyone an individual table top with a pack of sticky notes Ru...
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