Using Retrospectives to Channel Feedback

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Using Retrospectives to Channel Feedback

• Rachel Davies Peter Brown

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Session Overview

• Introduction 20 mins
• Exercise
• part 1 Safety
• part 2 Timelines
• part 3 Action planning
• Debrief 15 mins

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What is a Retrospective?

• A meeting where a team looks back on a past
  period of work so that they can learn from their
  experience and apply this learning to future
  projects

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Project Retrospectives

• Retrospectives were pioneered by Norman Kerth,
  author of Project Retrospectives a handbook for
  team reviews
• His book describes exercises for facilitating
  end of project retrospectives at a three day
  off-site meeting

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Heartbeat Retrospectives

• XP teams adapted Kerth's techniques to fit within
  their iterative development cycle
• Adaptation XP Style - XP2001
• Retrospectives support
• XP values Communication and Feedback
• XPv2 principles Humanity, Improvement, Reflection
  and Opportunity
• XPv2 practice Root Cause Analysis

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Agile Reflection

• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
  to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
  its behavior accordingly. Agile Manifesto
  principle
• Scrum method has a Sprint Review meeting that
  incorporates a Retrospective
• Reflection Improvement is a property of Crystal
• Agile projects aim to use Retrospectives during
  the life of the project rather than after
  catastrophic failure!

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Retrospective Cycle

• Types of Interim Retrospective
• Heartbeat within iteration cycle
• Milestone after a major release or within
  quarterly cycle
• Custom in response to a surprise event

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Why run an Interim Retrospective?

• Learning
• Reflection is a key step in learning from
  experience
• Ownership
• Gives a team a way to adapt process to their
  context
• Communication
• Each member of the project team has different
  experience and when we share these perspectives
  we understand each other better

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What a Retrospective is not ..

• A Retrospective is not a Witch-Hunt
• Retrospectives are not about blame
• Problems arise from forces created in the
  system rather than destructive individuals. The
  focus is on what we can learn from what happened

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Prime Directive

• Kerth's Prime Directive
• Regardless of what we discover, we must
  understand and truly believe that everyone did
  the best job he or she could, given what was
  known at the time, his or her skills and
  abilities, the resources available, and the
  situation at hand.

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Mutual Learning

• Assume..
• People are trying to act with integrity, given
  their situation
• I have relevant information, so do others
• Each of us may see things that others do not
• Differences are opportunities for learning

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Negative Packaging

• A message wrapped in a complaint may be worth
  listening to, but the negative packaging can harm
  the learning process
• Retrospective format should use activities which
  try to diffuse the negative nature of complaints
  ..

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Who runs a Retrospective?

• Neutral Facilitator
• Create an atmosphere in which team members feel
  comfortable talking
• Ensures the team ground-rules are respected
• Scribes what they hear but checks with the
  speaker for correctness
• Tests assumptions and inferences
• Asks for examples
• Digs deeper, 5 Why's

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Create Safety

• Create an atmosphere in which team members feel
  comfortable talking openly and honestly
• Establish ground rules
• Everything is optional
• Assess using secret ballot
• 5 No problem
• 1 No way

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Ground Rules

• For example..
• We will try not to interrupt (use a talking
  stick)
• We will talk from our own perspective and not
  speak for anyone else
• No jokes at the expense of anyone in the room
• Turn phones off

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Anatomy of a Retrospective

• Create Safety
• Build Timeline
• Mine Timeline
• Action Plans
• Appreciations
• Consider the context, adapt format to fit

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Sample Timeline 1

• Adapted Emotional Seismograph (Heartbeat)

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Sample Timeline 2

• Adpated Timeline with post-its (Milestone)

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Sample Timeline 3

• Create a project map (End of phase)

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Mining The Time Line

• What worked well?
• What to do differently?
• What still puzzles us?
• Use flip-chart / white board to categorize
  experience

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Action Plans

• Discuss of actions to take lessons learned
  forward
• Each action needs an owner responsible for
  delivery
• Display actions in team workspace
• Capture output (photograph/intranet/document),
  only make public with permission of team
• Review previous actions at the next retrospective

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Who should attend?

• Whole Team include different viewpoints
• Developers
• Testers
• Customer
• Project Manager
• DBA

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Any Questions?