Slides of my presentation at Agile Dev Practices conference (Postdam, March 4–7, 2013)

1. RETROSPECTIVE’S
RETROSPECTIVE

2. Setting the stage
• Vicenç García-Altés
• vigarcia@plainconcepts.com
• http://geeks.ms/blogs/devnettips
• @vgaltes

3. Setting the stage
• Sometimes a retrospective doesn’t have the expected results. Perhaps
people are barely involved, or they start blaming others, or they are yelling,
or whatever.
• As a facilitators we have to ask people for feedback at the end of the
retrospective, but sometimes we can’t get all the feedback we want. If
people did not have a good attitude during the retrospective, hardly they
will have now
• So, could be a good idea to spend some time analyzing why the
retrospective did not perform as we expected.

4. Setting the stage
• 45 minutes
• Goals
• Apply techniques mainly used in other areas in retrospectives
• Work in groups
• Have fun!

5. Gather data

6. Gather data
• Please organise into groups of 5 people.
• Think about a situation you have experienced in a
retrospective that has resulted in unsatisfactory
retrospective and explain it to the rest of the group. It
would be great if everybody in the group will explain at
least one experience.
• Choose one of the situations to work with it for the rest
of the session.

7. Generate insights

8. Generate insights
• We will use an empathy map to generate insights.
• Empathy maps were originally used to gain a deeper understanding
of a stakeholder in a business ecosystem, but we’ll try to apply them
to understand people’s behavior in a retrospective.
• Try to put yourself in the position of that person and fill the diagram
with sensory experiences. Try to think of what the person might hear,
feel, think, see, say and do. If you have time, do the same exercise but
from the perspective of the Scrum Master.
• You have 15 minutes.

9. Decide
what
to do

10. Decide what to do
• Now it’s time to use these insights and think about what we might do in the next
retrospective to avoid these bad situations.
• We could use several techniques but we will focus on two.
• The first one is the anti-problem. Given your situation, think about the opposite
problem. Thinking about the opposite problem will drive you to a possible solution
to the original problem
• The other one is magnification. This is good for subtle problems. Think about your
problem magnified to infinity. Then, think about what you could do to avoid it
completely.
• Please, don’t think about only one solution. Think about as many solutions as you
can. Be creative.
• You have 10-15 minutes

11. Close the retrospective

12. My two cents
• Start the retrospective reading the Prime Directive
• “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and
truly believe that everyone did the best job they could,
given what they knew at the time, their skills and
abilities, the resources available, and the situation at
hand.”

13. My two cents
• Prepare the retrospective
• Do the “setting the stage” step
• Use Dialog Sheets, Core Protocols.
• The objective is to have people focused on the
retrospective and to create a comfortable environment
to discuss issues.

14. THANK YOU!