Happy New Sprint everyone! What? You don’t celebrate the start of a new sprint? How about the start of a project? Well I for one want to advocate for it! While there might not be confetti, or champagne, or hats emblazoned with a sprint number, the start of a sprint is a fantastic time. Beginnings also symbolize a fresh start, a reset, an opportunity to try something new or validation that everything is going great. In Agile, these fresh starts are thanks in large part to one of the key ceremonies in Agile: the retro.
As 2020 approached, you probably reflected on your 2019, the good and the bad. Maybe you didn’t take those guitar lessons and want to try again in 2020. Maybe you want to test those new Spanish skills you learned during spring break in Mexico this year. Or maybe you decided 2019 didn’t deserve any attention and best to move on and focus your attention on 2020. Well done! You just participated in a retro! Retrospectives are simply a way to look back on what occurred in a past set of time (for example a project or sprint of work) and determine what could be improved.
There is no wrong way to retro! Like most things agile, retrospectives can be molded and defined by the team that is holding them. Here are some more commonly used retro styles and my recommendations for getting started:
- 4 Ls: Loved, Liked, Learned, Lacked
- As team members bring up a topic they’d like to discuss, utilizing this method can help them to shape and categorize the reflection; a Product Owner loved the team’s demo, a Lead Dev liked how meetings were succinct and to the point, a Junior Dev learned how to troubleshoot a common merge conflict, and maybe the team as a whole lacked time or clarity on stories. Whatever the topics raised, this method can help shape the retro in a constructive and easy to bucket way.
- The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
- For the movie buffs out there, this homage to Clint Eastwood. Like the wild west, it’s more to the point and doesn’t try to sugar coat the negatives, in fact it’s where this style tends to focus. Maybe it was good the team met regularly, maybe it was bad the project manager didn’t attend, and maybe it was ugly that UAT happened in production because the marketing team wasn’t available. You can categorize all the topics raised and then provide some quick outlaw justice to discussing them and moving forward.
- Start, Stop, Continue:
- A basic format for retro, this style simply allows for a forward-thinking collaboration of what a team wants to start doing (that they weren’t doing before), stop doing, and continue doing. A Team Lead wants to stop doing early morning demos, a Business Analyst wants to continue to have product backlog refinement meetings, and the Dev Team wants to start doing hack-a-thons. This method tends to focus more on the outcomes the topic raised vs. the topic itself, and is a good entry into retros.
No matter the style, the purpose of the meeting is for a team to get together and reflect on the work that was done. The takeaway from this event should be a collective path forward and a desire to continuously improve, whatever the focus of the team is. Agile mirrors our lives which is why it’s a great methodology. Agile also presents more opportunities to start fresh as retros tend to be follow the end of a sprint which can range anywhere from 2-4 weeks; thus improvement doesn’t require a full revolution around the sun.
So the next time you find yourself post retro, at the start of a new sprint or a new project, celebrate it! (Preferably with champagne and confetti).
Product Offensive 