James Shore

in 99 words

Start with Kerth's Prime Directive. Everyone makes mistakes; the Prime Directive reminds us to support, not attack, our colleagues.

Have participants brainstorm ideas in six categories: enjoyable, frustrating, puzzling; same, more less. Write each idea on a card.

Next, place the cards on a whiteboard. Move the cards so the most similar are closest together. Everybody participates; nobody speaks.

Circle and name the resulting categories. Choose one, then brainstorm root causes and solutions. Pick one: it's your retrospective objective. Follow through in the iteration to come.

When retrospectives get boring, try other formats. This is just a starting place.

as haiku

the roses, flooded--
consternation, solution,
implementation

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Inside This Section

• Retrospectives
• Types of Retrospectives
• How to Conduct an Iteration Retrospective
• Step 1: The Prime Directive
• Step 2: Brainstorming
• Step 3: Mute Mapping
• Step 4: Retrospective Objective
• After the Retrospective
• Questions
  • What if management isn't committed to making things better?
  • Despite my best efforts as facilitator, our retrospectives always degenerate into blaming and arguing. What can I do?
  • We come up with good retrospective objectives, but then nothing happens. What are we doing wrong?
  • Some people won't speak up in the retrospective. How can I encourage them to participate?
  • One group of people (such as testers) always gets outvoted in the retrospective. How can we meet their needs, too?
  • Our retrospectives always take too long. How can we go faster?
  • The retrospective takes so much time. Can we do it less often?
• Results
• Contraindications
• Alternatives
• Further Reading

Commentary

Continuous reflection and improvement are the keys to successful agility. Actually, I'd guess that they're the key to successful anything. As inventor Charles Kettering supposedly said, "Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't fail is the last time you try something and it works. One fails towards success."

In other words, learn from your mistkaes.

Actually, there's a bit more to it than that. Not only do you need to learn from your mistkaes, you have to apply what you've learned. If you don't, you'll just keep making the same mistkae over and over again... fully aware of how silly you're being, perhaps, but not actually improving.

That's why I think the most important part of the retrospective is what happens after you leave the room. During the retrospective, you'll reflect on the past and imagine the future. You'll conduct root-cause analysis and come up with solutions. That's great. But don't forget to pick one of those solutions and follow through on it.

That's harder than it seems. Take this website, for example--I've had minor spelling problems in my essays for years. It was only last month when I finally took the time to find and turn on the "Spell Check" feature of my text editor.

It's not that following through on your retrospective ideas is particularly difficult. It took me all of three minutes to find that Spell Check feature. The problem, I think, is that they're not directly related to the work at hand. When I'm writing a blog entry, my focus is on writing, not text editor preferences. Fixing the spell check problem felt like a distraction, and it wasn't strictly necessary for me to get my work done, so I put it off.

So, how do you follow through? It's the easiest thing in the world--and the hardest. Just set aside time for it. Make your retrospective objective part of your iteration plan, create a habit of updating your big visible charts at the end of the day, or something similar. This works best when you keep your retrospective objectives small, and only choose one per iteration. A few hours per week is enough.

Continuous reflection and improvement are the keys to successful agility. Regular retrospectives help with the reflection. Don't stop there, though--set aside a bit of time for improvement, too. If you do, you'll steadily get better... and that's no mistake.