Agile Retrospective

Retrospective essentials

SAP 2009 / Page 2

What is a retrospective
A retrospective is a joint effort by the whole project team to make continuous improvement within the LEAN journey.
It helps the team to look back at the last iteration and have the team insight.

The team members will answer essentially the three questions below
What went well What can be improved What are the impediments/obstacles

Team will Identify three main topics they want to improve in next Sprint. Retrospectives takes hour and 1 day Can be structured into 5 sections (Cf. agenda on the right picture)

Setting the stage Setting working rules, Expectations, goal Establish a set of behavior that
will support the team in having productive discussions. Establish that team members are responsible for monitoring their interactions. Provide suggestions for day-today working agreements if the team doesnt already have them Dont forget to ask the team members:
What are your expectations from this retrospective

Gather Data - with post-it

Moderator distributes postits to each team members

Each team members gives his/her feedback on Post-its

Different post-it color can be used to answer the three questions
What went well What can be improved What are the impediments/obstacles

Generate Insights make clusters

Moderator groups similar feedback in clusters on the Glad Flip chart

Sad flipchart are topics which make team members sad but is not that urgent Mad flip chart are topics which need to be addressed

Each team member sticks his/her post-it on the flipchart

Generate Insights with voting points

Once each team member has sticked his/her Sad post-it on the flip-chart Moderator groups similar feedback in clusters on the Glad Flip chart Moderator according to the number of clusters give a certain number of points, here 5 points to put on any post-its

Activities to Decide What to Do

Action Planning (brainstorm and prioritize): Have everybody on the team generate suggestions for actions individually (in the format above) Then build pairs, discussing their actions, prioritizing and reducing to e.g. four Then build groups of 4 who discuss the actions from the pairs, prioritizing and reducing the set even further Repeat, until whole group discusses the remaining action items that turned out to be the most important ones

Return on Time Invested (ROTI)

At the end of the retrospective gauge the effectiveness of the session from the team members perspectives. At the end of the retrospective, ask team members to give feedback on whether they spent their time well. Time needed: 10 min