A Method Well Suited for use at PI Boundaries and Project Milestones
On occasion, a scrum master will wish to facilitate a retrospective where the lens the team looks through is greater than a single sprint. Perhaps the retrospective falls along the boundary of a major project milestone, and the facilitator wishes to encourage reflection and discussion of the entire project. Similarly, the team might work in an organization that has implemented SAFe (the Scaled Agile Framework), and there may be a need for the team to reflect on the iterations comprising an entire program increment. Alternatively, a team may have experienced changes in its composition (with old team members leaving and new members joining), and the facilitator may wish to tease out the impact of the changes on the morale of individual members. In situations like these, where the goal is to encourage reflection on the experiences of individual contributors over multiple sprints, I have found the Tasty Cupcakes “moodgraph” to be an excellent method of facilitation.
A Versatile Method Well Adapted for an Agenda-less Retrospective
A scrum master who has been serving a team at length will often be able to observe anti-patterns and problems that would be well addressed in retrospective. As such, he or she might develop an “agenda,” or otherwise steer the natural flow of the team’s conversation so as to make certain that the pertinent issues are brought up for discussion. However, at other times the scrum master may want to make certain that his or her observations do not influence the course of discussion. Perhaps when working with a team where certain members are reluctant to share their thoughts, or in situations where the scrum master has a general topic worthy of discussion, but knows little about the context surrounding it. In these situations, facilitating using a lean coffee approach can be beneficial.
Using the NCAA Tournament to Heighten Engagement
I once attended a meetup where agile practitioners were encouraged to share and demonstrate the facilitation of their favorite retrospective strategies. One of the presenters shared her strategy of having teams utilize a NCAA style bracket to guide a gamified discussion focused on identifying problems and potential process improvements. It was a strategy that she liked to utilize in the month of March, when many team members were likely to be following the tournament as it unfolded. Having borrowed her method and used it with teams I work with, I have also found it to be a helpful method to add variety to retrospective during March when working with co-located teams.
Dice Games help add Lighthearted Variety to the Sprint Retrospective
Often times, incorporating games can help to vary a scrum master’s approach and avoid the rut that sometimes develops when we become too comfortable with our preferred methods of facilitation. Games can also prove particularly helpful in “breaking the ice” when working with new teams. One flexible means of gamification that I have personally incorporated into my own retrospectives is using dice when setting the stage or as a means of helping to generate insights.
A Popular, yet Flexible, Method for your Toolkit
One of the early references to this form of retrospective facilitation can be found in Ester Derby and Diana Larsen’s Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great—a seminal work of retrospective theory—where it is suggested as a warm-up activity. The method has been adopted by countless facilitators, and articles can also be found online suggesting its use as a check-out activity (“one word before leaving”), a supplementary means of heightening engagement, or primary means of facilitation when coupled with post-it notes and affinity diagraming. In my personal experience, I have found the strategy to be particularly useful when incorporated as one of a series of supplementary methods to help keep the facilitator’s retrospective format from going stale.
Asking Questions: A Preferred Pattern for Facilitation
In an earlier post, I mentioned that it is common for scrum masters to identify patterns of facilitation they find most suitable for their teams and come to rely on them as a default method. While relying on any single method can pose a long-term problem if it leads to disengagement, being able to identify a method for its relevance and effectiveness as a means of facilitation is important for any agile practitioner. In my journey as a scrum master, the method that I have found most helpful in retrospective, is working with the team to identify, unpack, and generate actionable next steps through the process of asking relevant questions grounded within the context of the team’s processes and the work of the former sprint.
Start/Stop/Continue: Perhaps the most popular strategy for retrospective facilitation
When I first started working as a scrum master back in 2016, the start, stop, and continue exercise was introduced to me as the method of facilitation at the crux of most successful retrospectives. Indeed, one of the best articles I have ever read describing the facilitation strategy was written that same year by Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software, a founding member of both the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance.
The History and Theory of Retrospectives
The idea that development teams need to be given time to inspect and adapt is not a new one. Principle twelve of the Agile Manifesto, published in February of 2001, states that at “regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
Retrospection on Retrospectives
In my time as a scrum master, I have been fortunate to attend many different conferences and training opportunities, where I have been able to meet and learn from colleagues who work in a variety of organizations. A common prompt posed to attendees by the agile practitioners facilitating the events is “which of our agile ceremonies is the most valuable?” Again and again, the response most commonly provided by practitioners—and validated by our trainers—is the agile retrospective.
Thanks for visiting my new website!
Hello, and welcome to my website, The Agile American! My name is Matthew Duff, and I am a practicing scrum master in central Indiana’s technology hub. A native-born hoosier, I have lived in Indiana my entire life. While I feel fortunate to have traveled a bit in my lifetime, a source of contentment for me in my professional career has always been the relationships that I have been able to develop and maintain within the “smaller world” of software development in my home state. My primary goal for this site is to create a forum for discussion where I hope all my colleagues within software development (and perhaps IT more broadly), will feel comfortable engaging with me in a fruitful discussion of ideas and practices related to the field of software development. While my expertise as an agilest will naturally lead me to focus my reflections and research on the methodologies and best practices related to agile software development, I hope that my many colleagues and friends in other “IT project management-y” type roles will also find the content here helpful.
