The Optimistic Retrospective

Today, my software team had a good retrospective.

Retrospective is often regarded by teams as almost optional - something that can be first thing discarded from the dreaded monotony of Scrum ceremonies as soon as there's a good reason - such as an incoming deadline, or the incoming arrival of a stale cake in the lunchroom. Even when a retro takes place, often the same voices raise the same tired points as last week, or we have 45 minutes of tearing apart why a 1 point card took 3 points worth of effort.

The secret of being an agile team (rather than merely doing #Agile) is that a team must step back and periodically reflect on how they need to adjust how they're working. That is true as to whether you're doing Scrum, or a Kanban workflow, or something else entirely. Improving processes through retrospectives is one of those things like sharpening an axe that makes felling the whole tree faster.

So - why was today's retro good?

We looked forward, we charted obstacles, we planned some routes around them, and we charted our immediate path. Metaphorically speaking, of course. None of this should be surprising, but the reality is that often a team can become disengaged from the retro process.

In my few years of scrum mastering, one of the things I've found is that bringing a new form of retrospective can enable new discussions, even if you only use it for a sprint or two. Many teams stick with the same format weekly - something like:

• What went well
• What went badly
• What questions do we have

That's not inherently bad - but the scrum guide never actually prescribes a retrospective style. We're supposed to be being agile - friends: you can mix it up, change it up and heck - if you want, you can make it up. Different styles of retrospective can 'unlock' new perspectives.

I'm going to tell you about the process we used today. We may do it again soon - we may not. We're being agile - and if you feel like you want to give it a try, feel free to change it up however you wish. (I'll also note that I've borrowed large chunks of this one from another source which I neglected to note, but made some changes of my own. It's not a novel or groundbreaking retro.)

I'm going to refer to it as 'The Optimistic Retrospective'

I'm referring to it as 'The Optimistic Retrospective' as it's designed to start from a perspective of where we want to be, rather than starting with reflection immediately.

Let's go through it. Like most retrospectives, you'll need a board (digital or physical) to stick cards on.

We start with 'Where do you want to go?'. The reason is that we're looking forward, and being optimistic in imagining what the team might be. Personally, that tends to put me in a better frame of mind for useful discussion than starting with 'what's wrong with the team'.

Give the team a few minutes to put their cards in this section. I use 'popcorn' rules - I have a timer, but I tend to let it keep going until the popcorn stops popping.

Our goal is for the team to think about what they'd like out of the team in the future. This could be things like:

• "No more late night prod incidents"
• "More Python, less Java"
• "Stand up to be 15 minutes"
• "Finish our sprints"
• "Be paid more"

As hinted by the arrow, the team puts entries that are in the shorter term (like, in the next sprint) on the left side of the card, and things that are longer term (like, in coming months or years) on the right side of the card.

This isn't the place to argue about what people want: what some people want out of the team may be in opposition to what other people do.

After filling out the 'Where do you want to go?' we move on to 'What's holding us up?'.

We go through the entries in the 'Where do you want to go?' quadrant and, as a team, we add entries to the 'What's holding us up?' section. Put the entries in the relevant quadrant based on whether the thing is something your team can control, or if it's something that's internal to your team.

The reason why we do this is that it allows us to observe changes that we can personally effect (such as 'Start our stand-up on time') in that golden quadrant of 'Inside Our Control/Inside Our Team' - which makes it easier to focus on them. Stuff that's 'Outside Our Control/Outside Our Team' may not be worth immediately focussing on, because they may require systematic change. It is still worth noting them, as they can provide the impetus to start pushing for that change outside your team. Even if you can't, a team members can feel a little vindicated with 'this sucks, but we can at least know and acknowledge that it's an issue.'

One entry in the 'Where do you want to go?' may result in multiple 'What's holding us up?' entries. For instance, that 'Be paid more' might result in an entry that's Outside our team/Outside our control of 'Budget constraints', but might also have an Outside our team/Inside our control of 'People don't know what value we provide'.

We addressed 'What are some solutions?' mostly simultaneously with 'What's holding us up?', but it could very well be done afterwards.

The goal is to, as a team, brainstorm solutions to the things that are holding the team up. It is good to focus on things that the team actually can achieve. This is also a really good place to directly ask quieter members of the team for ideas and encourage broader discussion.

And, the pointy end: 'so, what are we gonna do about it?'. Once the rest of the sections have been done, as a team, choose a few things to focus on the immediately upcoming sprint.

I'm not going to tell you to 'pick exactly one thing', or prescribe a number - because your teams should have experience from sprint planning in trying to forecast what they can realistically achieve.

And as always, when you get to the next retrospective - by whichever form you run it - look back, and see if what you changed was effective. The whole point of agile is continuously improving the process that you work under.

Remember friends: be agile. Don't just do Agile.

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This here has all been written in my personal capacity, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer.