Topic: Retrospective – heart of scrum Scrum is simple agile framework, but sometimes it’s hard to implement it with some team. Scrum should be understood not as a collection artifacts and meeting, but as a philosophy of your daily work. You need to adopt new habits which improve your performance as a team and try to get rid of waste which slows you down. Retrospective is proper instrument to implement this type of thinking. I’ll talk on how to use this powerful tool and will provide some insights, tips and trick from my long experience being a Scrum Master. About Aleksej: Aleksej is Experienced Software Developer and Agile Coach with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry. Skilled in Java, Coaching, Agile Methodologies, Spring and other. Strong engineering professional and active leader of Java community in Vilnius Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksejsipulia/

1. Retrospective - heart of Scrum
Aleksej Šipulia

2. Me
Experienced Software Developer and
Agile Coach with a demonstrated
history of working in the financial
services industry. Skilled in Java,
Coaching, Agile Methodologies, Spring
and other. Strong engineering
professional and active leader of Java
community in Vilnius

4. People are too busy doing the REAL work!

5. http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
Retrospective
in principles
behind Agile
Manifesto

7. Scrum in a nutshell
Roles:
● Product Owner
● ScrumMaster
● Development Team
Ceremonies/meetings:
● Sprint planning
● Sprint demo/review
● Retrospective
● Daily scrum/standup
Artifacts:
● Product backlog
● Sprint backlog
● Burndown chart
● *Working agreement
● *Definition of Done

8. Prescriptive vs adaptive

9. What is Retrospective
● Goal? Continuous improvement in the team process
● What? The team inspects and adapts their process
● Who? The Product Owner (PO), Team and Scrum Master.
The SM facilitates (usually)
● When? At the end of each sprint, after the Sprint review.
In a retrospective, a team steps back, examines the way they
work, analyzes, and identify ways they can improve.

10. When to do a retrospective?

11. Retrospective structure
1. Set the stage
2. Gather data
3. Generate insights
4. Decide what to do
5. Close the retrospective

12. 1 Stage: Set the stage - Purpose
● Create a good, safe environment
● Get every voice in the room
● Review accomplishment of actions decided on previous
retrospective
● Establish the focus for this retrospective
● Share the plan for the meeting
● Establish or re-purpose Retrospective working
agreements

13. 1 Stage: Set the stage - Working Agreements
● Social contracts where the team members agree on how
they will work together during the retrospectives.
Examples:
● Avoid blame. Use “I” language rather than “You” or “They”
language when describing issues
● No personal attacks
● Focus on the problem, not on personalities
● Avoid interrupting others

14. 1 Stage: Set the stage - Examples

15. 1 Stage: Set the stage - Review experiments
Review accomplishment of main actions decided on
previous retrospectives

16. 1 Stage: Set the stage - Examples
● Cat videos
● Ok, ok…. dog videos
● Funny viral video :)
● 1 word about previous sprint
● ...

20. 2 Stage: Gather data - Purpose
● Create a shared pool of data
● Ground the retrospective in facts, not opinions
● Consider objective and subjective experience
● When? What How?

21. 2 Stage: Gather data - Purpose
Gather each team member’s input on questions:
● What went well
● What could have been better
● Things to try
● Issues to escalate (to Management) etc.

22. 2 Stage: Gather data - Examples
Pluses & minus/delta

23. 2 Stage: Gather data - Examples
● Mad
● Sad
● Glad

24. 2 Stage: Gather data - Examples
Starfish
● Keep doing
● More of
● Start doing
● Stop doing
● Less of

25. 2 Stage: Gather data - Examples
4 L’s
● Liked
● Learned
● Lacked
● Longed for

26. 2 Stage: Gather data - Examples
+/-/Ideas To try/Thank You

27. 2 Stage: Gather data - Examples

29. 3 Stage: Generate insights

31. Goals of stage 3 and 4

32. Root cause analysis

33. Root cause analysis

34. 3 Stage: Generate insights - Purpose
● Understand systemic influences and root causes
● Observe patterns
● Move beyond habitual thinking
● See system effects

35. 3 Stage: Generate insights - Purpose
● Group data
● Dot voting data clusters
● Drill down to root cause

36. 3 Stage: Generate insights - issue drill down
5 Why

37. 3 Stage: Generate insights
Dot voting

38. 4 Stage: Decide what to do - Purpose
● Move from discussion to action
● Resolve on one or two actions or experiments
● Focus on what the team can accomplish
● Make a good balance between what the team has energy
for and what is most important

39. 4 Stage: Decide what to do
● Use Dot Voting to prioritize action items
● Select most important 1-2 (max 3) items
● For each selected items write SMART (Specific, Measurable,
Achievable, Relevant, Timely) action items either to accomplish the
goal or take concrete steps toward it
● Ensure that those items are not forgotten Negotiate with
PO a budget of team hours/story points per sprint to be
used for process improvement

40. Metrics
?

41. Leading and lagging indicators
Leading indicator: as observable properties that would
indicate that we are getting closer to the defined Goal.
Leading indicators are probabilistic and may give false
results, and we therefore need a set of several leading
indicators that together give us a usable level of certainty.

42. Leading and lagging indicators
Lagging indicator: as observable properties that would
indicate that we are not getting away from an achieved Goal.
Lagging indicators are directly observable, but can only be
measured after the event.

43. 4 Stage: Decide what to do
● Define very concrete Action Items (1-3)
● Assign responsible persons
● Experiment during one or two sprints
● Review results during next retrospective and decide if the
experiment was successful (and act accordingly)

44. Where to keep action items?
Sprint backlog vs. Separate experiment list

45. Success vs. failure
● If experiments succeeds - put it into working agreement or
definition of done and remove from experiment list / close
backlog item
● If it fails or it’s hard to measure progress remove it and
forget.
● Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn

46. 5 Stage: Close the retrospective - Purpose
● Reiterate actions and follow-up
● Appreciate contributions
● Identify ways to make next iteration better
● Finish on positive note

47. 5 Stage: Close the retrospective - Examples

48. Sources to get inspiration - Retromat

49. Sources to get inspiration - books

50. Other sources to get inspiration
● Ask Scrum Masters from other teams to facilitate a
retrospective – this brings new styles and new ideas
● Go to agile meetups
(https://www.meetup.com/AgileLietuva)
● Go to agile conferences
● Just google

51. Tips, tricks and ideas
● Proper retrospective vs. light retro
● Timeboxing the meeting
● Prepare for the retro
● Pick/switch location
● Sometimes swap facilitators
● Bring candy and chocolate
● Anti retro
● …

52. ?