Alternative Retrospective

Often we struggle to give feedback to the team because there are some team members who might not be comfortable with the idea of open communication especially when it comes to giving / receiving negative feedback.

In Scrum transparency is a pillar and hence the team develops comfort in giving and receiving feedback in an open forum.

One gentle way to give feedback is to score in a balanced way. We can select a set of scoring items and then each team member individually scores (without seeing or showing the scores to anyone) the team on these aspects.

Following rules can be followed:

• Each person will score the team on each point
• Give a 2 for areas where s/he thinks that the team needs improvement
• Give a 3 for areas where s/he thinks that the team is doing well
• If you have 20 areas that will be scored, you can need to give exactly ten 2s and ten 3s, reason is that the team is giving a balanced score so for each 2 you get, you also get a 3 on some other item
• This allows for the team to feel good about themselves while giving some critical feedback
• Once done, the team can get on a call and update a shared sheet simultaneously. This will ensure that no one gets biased by other person's score for a particular point
• So for 20 areas where scoring was done the vertical total will be 50 for each person doing the score. If it is more than 50 for a person then that means that they have score more than 10 items with a 3. They will be asked to go back and fix it

Main advantage

• The horizontal scores will determine where the team is actually weak
• For example, if the 4 people have given a 2 in sprint planning and 1 person has given a 3. The average score for that area would be 2.2 ((2+2+2+2+3)/5) which is less than 2.5
• This can be taken by the team as an area for improvement and revisit in next retrospective
• The team still feels good about themselves as there would be areas where they score more than 2.5 which indicates a strength
• Since the team is self-evaluating themselves, they are more open to accepting the scores rather than challenging the scrum master or anyone else

Possible areas to score for a development team (20 areas/points)

• Are we doing good Sprint planning?/ Planning poker use / Brainstorming? ?
• Is backlog grooming nicely done and in a timely way? ?
• How is the quality of tickets/stories (how much relevant detail)? ?
• Are tickets created in a time way? Are minutes of meetings documented in a timely way? ?
• Are developers puting updates on inprogress tickets on daily basis?
• Are we happy with development Velocity / Productivity? ?
• Are we happy with quality of development? ?
• Are we happy with quality of testing? ?
• How much the team is helping each other? Do team members feel part of a team or isolated? ?
• Is the client (internal or external) happy with our work? ?
• Are we able to get past our previous mistakes or we keep on making them over and over again? ?
• Are we able to find out root cause of errors in the product? ?
• Are we able to find out root cause of errors in our process? ?
• Are we doing good estimation? ?
• Are we doing good demos? ?
• Are we doing good standups? ?
• Are we communicating well with each other as a team? ?
• Are we proactively handling problems or are we reactive? ?
• Are we on time for meetings? If someone is always messaging that they will be late then there is something wrong with their time management? ?
• Are we on time for office? Do we all share video on internal and external calls? Does our internet and power backup work when we do work from home?

One team we worked with found out that they needed to get better at "backlog grooming" and doing "daily ticket updates" analysis as they scored below 2.5 average on these points.

Do you have a similar tool that you use to give and receive feedback as a team? Would you like to share the idea around that tool?

Would you like someone to run this session for your team just to get comfortable with the idea?