First day at JAOO - Agile retrospectives

I'm in Aarhus, Denmark for the JAOO-conference.

For the first day of JAOO, I went to a tutorial on "Agile retrospectives" with Diana Larsen. It was a really good workshop, with a lot of exercises on different ways to gather information and deciding what to do about it.

All agile methods focuses on continuous learning (inspect-and-adapt). The only way to be better at something is to learn what you are doing wrong, and do something about it. Or as Diana put it "You could do the same thing over and over again, and hoping for a different result - But that is often called insanity".

Basics of a retrospective

Here is a short summary of what was discussed during the tutorial.

• Set the stage
  • Working agreements, room setup, everybody's feelings ("Are we ready to start this?"), goal, agenda
• Gather data
  • Get everybody's perspective of what really happened during the iteration/release/project etc.
• Generate insight
  • Get a group's shared picture
• Decide what to do
  • Prioritize and choose a few improvements that will make a difference to the team
• Close the retrospective
  • Summarize follow-up activities, and thank team members for their hard work with the retrospective. End in good spirit, nothing bad with a little celebration.

And don't forget the follow up. It is really bad for the motivation of the team members if the result is just laying and collecting dust in a word document. somewhere.