Three Steps to Make the Retrospective Funny
As a measurement to continuous improvement, retrospective is a very important activity recommended by the Scrum framework, for a team to get together and looking back on the things happened during the Sprint, and try to answer three questions:
- What are we doing well in the Sprint?
- What could we do better in this Sprint?
- What are the actions that we can start to do in next Sprint?
The retrospective is equal to what is called as “After Action Review”, that’s why we’re doing a little bit different from the standard way of retrospective, which is what we called as “goal driven” retrospective, typically includes below steps:
- List all the Sprint goals and compare with the actual achievements;
- Identify out the gaps
- Analysis the root cause for each of the gaps
- Identify the actions for every root cause identified
To complete all above steps, it requires everybody in the team to take it seriously, but besides those “serious” activities, we’re also trying to make our retrospective full of fun. Below are some of the activities which are interesting:
- Taking fun photos/videos
As indicated in the article “Agile Recognition-How Do We Do It?”, we’re electing Sprint Star and Excellent Scrum team for every Sprint. And every Scrum team could take some interesting photos for their Sprint Star candidate as well as for the team in memory of great moments during the Sprint.
The photo of the Sprint Star candidate could be taken at the moments when he/she is working very hard on fixing some difficult issues or helps others to solve issues such as co-debugging in the code.
The photo of the team could be taken when some activities happened among two or more team members, e.g. two team members are pair programming, or the who team is getting together on code walk through.
Team could even decorate those photos in the way they like, as long as those decorations make the photos funny.
In addition to the photos, team could also take some videos which are more intuitive to show how team members are working together to get something done during the Sprint.
2. Tell a story
Associated with the Sprint Star candidate, team will try to write a short story about him/her, on the things happened during the Sprint, particularly explain why he/she is elected by the team as the Sprint Star.
Like the photos/videos, the story should be funny, and additionally, the behaviors demonstrated by the Sprint Star as documented in the story should also be linked to some of the core Scrum values.
3. Rotate retrospective presenters
The whole team will get together after each individual Scrum team has completed their respective retrospectives, and each Scrum team will present their retrospective report during the team retrospective, where the Scrum master from a Scrum team would be the default presenter.
In our team retrospective, we’ve a few of optional ways for a particular team to present the retrospective result:
- Rotate the presenter
A team member will be the main presenter from the beginning to the end, however, a new team member will be the presenter in next retrospective.
- Co-presenter
Every team member will be present one section of the retrospective, so that everybody in the team will have the chance to speak out.
We're dividing the big team into several small Scrum teams, and each individual Scrum team will first do their respective retrospective, before meeting as a big team. I am believe this is the most efficient approach, because it would be boring if we've the big team sit together doing the retrospective but very few people would like to say something. If the retrospective of a small team is funny, most likely, the fun would be transmit to the big team.