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Agile retrospectives: Why, What and How
Dmitriy Viktorov
AgileDays’10, St.Petersburg, September 17th 2010
Postmortems in pre-Agile days
21 September,
2010
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When
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How to make retrospective successful
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Preparation
• Place
• Participants
• Agenda / goals
• Toolbox
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Conducting the retrospective
• Check in (warm-up)
• Collecting feedback
• Facilitation techniques
• Lead people, time, yourself
Check-in & Warm-up
• Get participants in the right mood
• Code of conduct
• Make agenda and goals visible
• Share context, display data,
timeline
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Project timeline (example)
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• 2 more sprints added
• Milestones:
• Beta 1 – the end of November,
• Beta 2 – the end of December,
• RC1 – the end of January,
• RC2 – the end of February,
• RTM – the mid/end of March
Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar
Beta 1 RC1 RTMBeta 2 RC2
Sprint statistics (example)
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Sprint PBL items Capacity Work effort
# Total Done Undone SWE+QE Total Done Undone
S1 17 10 7 97.9 99 52 47
S2 17 13 4 94 90 60 30
S3 21 20 1 89.3 91 83 8
S4 16 14 2 123.2 122 85 37
S5 20 14 6 110.2 112 64 48
S6 17 10 7 91.2 97 60 37
S7 21 13 8 116.6 114 68 46
S8 10 7 3 80.5 57 38 19
• Statistics based on PBL data
Bug trend report (example)
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How to gather feedback
• Classic Scrum
• Starfish
• Keep, Drop, Fix, Try
• 3L’s (4L’s)
• Checklist
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Assessment form (example)
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Sprint 2
Sprint 7
Leading the retrospective
• Time
• Start and finish on time
• Timebox activities
• Have breaks
• People
• Personalities (quiet, overbeating, passive, aggressive)
• Introverts vs. extroverts
• You
• Facilitator vs. team member
• Let others talk
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Analyze feedback
• Group similar items
• Separate team and company level items
• Root cause analysis
• Select top 3/5/10 items to work on
• Discuss actions, owners and schedule
Group and separate items
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Group and separate items
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Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
Group 4 Group 5 Group 6
Group and separate items
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Group 6
Group 1
Group 5
Group 2
Group 4
Group 3
TEAM COMPANY
Root cause analysis
• Interview/questions
• 5 Why’s
• Fishbone
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Decide what, who and when
• Identify things that make difference
• Owner is not always the one who will do it
• Start with near-term improvements
• Get support for long-term improvements
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Closing the retrospective
• End in positive way
• Appreciation
• Celebrate (cake, champagne, fireworks)
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Follow up
• Share retrospective results
• Make comments and actions visible
• Add user stories, tasks to sprint/product backlog
• Check the status regularly
• Review on next retrospective
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Smells
• Reporting to management
• Offline retrospective (by email)
• Only a few participants
• Everybody is happy
• Blame game
• Nobody talks about elephant
• Looking for silver bullets
• Retrospective in the team room
• Too short retrospective meeting
• Facilitator doesn’t facilitate
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