Ben Linders

Meanwhile my book The Agile Self-assessment Game has been released. Contact me if you are interested in a review copy.

Thanks you for this interesting article on retrospectives Chris!

As with many agile practices, you can learn to do retrospectives most effectively by doing them. My advice is to start with retrospectives in the first iteration. Use a simple exercise like asking questions or a boat exercise. Just try it with one or more teams.

As you mentioned you should not worry when things go wrong initially. I prefer to evaluate every retrospective that I do by asking the people who attended the meeting if it was useful? Did it help them to get a shared understanding how things are going? Do the actions that come out of the meeting make sense? Does meeting as a team to reflect feel good to them? These questions and the answers from the team help you as a facilitator to keep retrospectives both effective and efficient.

Ben Linders - Co author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives

Thanks you for this interesting article on retrospectives Chris!

As with many agile practices, you can learn to do retrospectives most effectively by doing them. My advice is to start with retrospectives in the first iteration. Use a simple exercise like asking questions or a boat exercise. Just try it with one or more teams.

As you mentioned you should not worry when things go wrong initially. I prefer to evaluate every retrospective that I do by asking the people who attended the meeting if it was useful? Did it help them to get a shared understanding how things are going? Do the actions that come out of the meeting make sense? Does meeting as a team to reflect feel good to them? These questions and the answers from the team help you as a facilitator to keep retrospectives both effective and efficient.

Ben Linders - Co author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives

Thanks you for this interesting article on retrospectives Chris!

As with many agile practices, you can learn to do retrospectives most effectively by doing them. My advice is to start with retrospectives in the first iteration. Use a simple exercise like asking questions or a boat exercise. Just try it with one or more teams.

As you mentioned you should not worry when things go wrong initially. I prefer to evaluate every retrospective that I do by asking the people who attended the meeting if it was useful? Did it help them to get a shared understanding how things are going? Do the actions that come out of the meeting make sense? Does meeting as a team to reflect feel good to them? These questions and the answers from the team help you as a facilitator to keep retrospectives both effective and efficient.

Ben Linders - Co author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives

Agile self-assessment help teams to explore how agile they are already and what can be the possible next steps to become more agile and lean. In my recent blog post self-assessing how agile you are I present the results from an open space session about Agile Self-Assessments organized by nlScrum where we discussed why self-assessments matter and how teams can self-assess their agility to become better in what they do. One conclusing from the meetup: Assessing agile mindsets and values matters!

For those interested in doing agile self-assessments there is a list of agile self-assessment checklists and tools that you can use.

@John that's also a way to use why, but then you're turning it into a root cause analysis. Aka as the 5 times why retrospective.

Great article, thanks for sharing your experiences with retrospectives.

I've been using the 4 retrospective questions, both with agile and non-agile teams. For me they have shown to be very effective. I like the question "What went well", it's a Solution Focused approach to find strengths which can be deployed to improve further. Also the question "what puzzles us" has given very useful insights for teams, by revealing things which had remained unspoken before I asked the question.

As an example, my blog post Getting Business Value out of Agile Retrospectives describes several techniques that I have used in retrospectives. It also mentions the Prime Directive from Norm Kerth: “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”. This directive is useful to set a culture where people are open to learn and improve, in stead of seeking blame.

I'm always interested to hear about experiences with retrospectives, there is still a lot that we can learn!

Great article, thanks for sharing your experiences with retrospectives.

I've been using the 4 retrospective questions, both with agile and non-agile teams. For me they have shown to be very effective. I like the question "What went well", it's a Solution Focused approach to find strengths which can be deployed to improve further. Also the question "what puzzles us" has given very useful insights for teams, by revealing things which had remained unspoken before I asked the question.

As an example, my blog post Getting Business Value out of Agile Retrospectives describes several techniques that I have used in retrospectives. It also mentions the Prime Directive from Norm Kerth: “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”. This directive is useful to set a culture where people are open to learn and improve, in stead of seeking blame.

I'm always interested to hear about experiences with retrospectives, there is still a lot that we can learn!

One more quote: "Good code is its own best documentation" - Steve McConnell