Sent: Monday, March 03, 2008 10:33 AM
To: Santiago, John
Subject: Scrum iteration retrospective
Our first iteration ended up going reasonably well. We moved about 20% of the original work back into the backlog, but the client readily agreed that these were low priority things. We'll have our first retrospective tomorrow morning at 9am, followed by our second iteration planning meeting.
I was wondering if you had any advise on how to conduct the retrospective....
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For the Retrospective, use whatever facilitation technique you are most familiar with, but as ScrumMaster you should keep the following points in mind:
- You want to encourage participation, don’t let anyone sit out quietly.
- Avoid undue influence on your part. As facilitator, your job is to gather other’s opinion. Save your own until you are sure everyone else has gotten theirs out.
- Encourage dialogue, but don’t let more vocal and opinionated folks drown out others, especially folks who are hesitant to talk.
Here’s a facilitation technique that might help:
- Give everyone two index cards.
- Ask them to write down five things that went well on one card and five things that went poorly on another. You can participate in this.
- Collect all of the cards
- On a shared visual space (whiteboard or flip-chart) start writing down responses for what went well.
- First read the item and ask if this is a new item, a duplicate, or if it amends another item. Let the group guide you, but you might make some suggestions to move it along.
- Repeat this process for What Didn’t Work Well, creating a new list.
- At the end, give everyone three Dots. Use stickers or sticky-notes as dots. They get to use these as votes for what to talk about further, perhaps items to adapt what we are doing as a team. People can put all their dots on one item, or spread them around as they see fit, but they have to vote with all three.
- From there, take your top items and discuss how to adapt your process in the next Sprint.
John
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