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RETROSPECTIVES
E X E R C I S E S
Appreciation Exercise to close
your Retrospective
by Luis Goncalves

Source: Luis Goncalves

This exercise came from an inspiration at the Team Coaching training in

Amsterdam. You can use this exercise to close your Agile Retrospective.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

The idea behind executing this exercise is very simple; the exercise will increase the
positivity of a team. The use of appreciations is something that is done by dozens of
teams all over the world. Studies proved us over and over that positivity in teams leads
to high performance, and of course creates a great environment inside of the team.
Therefore, if you are looking for an exercise that will increase positivity and team
bounding, this is a possibility.

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 WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

I am a stronger believer that we do not need to have any specific reason to execute an
exercise like this. I believe in appreciations and thats why I am trying to create an
appreciation culture within a company where I currently work. We will try to start or end
every meeting with 5 minutes round of appreciations. I really believe this is something
very easy to do and has an extreme impact!

HOW TO DO IT?

Start creating a half circle with chairs. The other half of the circle will only contain one
chair that will face the whole group. This chair will be called the: Central Chair.

Make sure you communicate to everyone that you want to have an environment of
respect, authenticity and profound listening. Afterwards, explain the exercise in the
context of appreciative inquiry.

To start, ask one person to volunteer to be in the Central Chair. Other members of the
circle volunteer and take turns (and their time), to say what they liked about the Central
Chair persons contributions to the group or team using the sentence:

You really served the group whenand when (Keep it to a minimum of 2 appreciation
statements) followed by What I would like to see more of.(Keep it to 1 statement).

A few other members of the circle then volunteer their appreciative feedback. After a few
people have volunteered, someone else volunteers for Central Chair. You gauge the
length of time spent on the exercise, depending on interest of group, etc.

Ideally everyone in the team should be able to provide and receive appreciations. As a
facilitator you can ask if there is someone that was not seated in the chair that would like
to try out. And of course you can ask, as well, if there is someone else that did not provide
appreciations that would like to do it at that moment. Its important to give an extra
opportunity to people to provide and receive appreciation but not forcing anyone to do
something they are not comfortable with.

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The Instant Retrospective
by Luis Goncalves

Source: Catalina

The Instant Retrospective helps agile teams to tackle problems instantly. Its a useful
way to fix critical topics without further delay. The strength of this technique is the strong
focus and solution orientated approach! It gives you the chance to fight against problems
that prevent the team to perform.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

Normally at the end of iteration the team runs their regular retrospective that focuses
on the team and the process. The Instant Retrospective is a spontaneous way to create
instant improvement! You are able to come to an agreement very fast so that you will
get rid of impediments right away without any further delay. This exercise will teach the
team to solve problems by themselves without waiting for the upcoming daily stand-up
or regular retrospective. The team will learn how to take care about constant dialogue and
discussion so that they can help others to achieve the common objective.

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 WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

You can run this exercise whenever you want But not as often as you want! In the
normal way you would raise problems or improvements in the end of the sprint.
But if you think that there is a topic that just cannot wait until the next regular
retrospective, call your team instantly!

Evaluate and assess the problem that has to be tackled very well and decide if you
could solve it with an instant retrospective within a timeframe of about 30-45 minutes.
The Instant Retrospective should be used as an exceptional way on how to find an im-
provement immediately. It should NOT replace your regular retrospective.

HOW TO DO IT?

One of the most important details

about the Instant Retrospective is the
focus on one single topic. Every team
member is allowed to raise his voice
within a sprint and start the Instant
Retrospective. Regardless of who starts
the initiative, there must be a very clear
understanding why the topic is important.
Here is a set of questions you can use
for moderation in order to get your
problem solved:

What is the topic?

This retrospective is a One-Topic discussion One single issue that has to be improved!
Therefore it is essential to get everybody on board. Dont take too long on explaining the
problem Make it short and clear so that you have the full attention and understanding
of every team member.

Why is it important?

Get everybody on the same page and make clear why this issue is a problem and
why it is important to improve right away. As you have evaluated the topic very well you
should have very good arguments why this topic cannot wait until the next regular
retrospective. This part is actually quite important because if people understand the
purpose of something, they will be much more engaged in finding the right solution.

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How can we solve it?

This is the moment where the complete team comes up with potential solutions The
Action Points. Although you might have a solution in mind, dont push people to accept
your personal solution. Give them the chance to find their own way to get the problem
fixed If everybody really understood the problem its very likely that they will come up
with even better solution.

The second advantage of creating solutions by the team is that it is more likely that they
will apply it autonomously afterwards. Otherwise it would be a typical manager situation
where they get told to change something on this way and they will just dont care and not
take it serious. In an agile environment, its essential for success that every member of
the team learns how to interact and collaborate.

Once team members came up with some possible options that could improve the
current situation, get sure that everybody in the room agrees on the action point.
A facilitator should take care on making the actions points visual in the room.
A good way is setting up a Flipchart with all solution orientated items. Afterwards
you can hang it up in the room That makes the topic present and raises awareness
afterwards.

An Instant Retrospective should not take too long. Make it time-boxed! Depending on the
teams size let them know before you start in which time frame you are planning to solve
the issue. This can help you to avoid off-topics. From my experience, 30-45 minutes is
an adequate time frame.

In the last step you summarize all the actions points the team came up with. These
generated action points are supposed to be applied right afterwards. If there is a point
that has to be done by a single person, ask the team who will take care on it.

As you made all points transparent, recheck all items in your next regular retrospective
by verifying if the situation improved.

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Lego a great tool for your Agile
Retrospectives
by Luis Goncalves

A quite nice exercise that can be used in agile retrospectives is the LEGO Retrospective.
Normally team members are enjoying this playful technique as they are joining a totally
new creative space where they will define their improvements on an abstract layer.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

The LEGO Retrospective helps teams to express their thoughts in a playful way. While you
are doing this exercise you jump out of the rules of ordinary life and replace them with the
rules of this game. Most members might have played LEGO when they were kids, so
motivation level normally is very high. Therefore even introvert team members who tend
to speak very little have a chance to express themselves.

WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

If you have never been a facilitator of a retrospective before then this exercise is an easy
way to start. This technique can vary from time to time, which makes it suitable in many
situations.

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 HOW TO DO IT?

Then get all team members on board by getting the agreement to the rules of that new
space. The prime directive can help you by getting this agreement. As in every
retrospective team members should feel and know that this round is a safe place
to share opinions and thoughts although it might be risky or uncomfortable.

Now tell all team members to sit down in a circle and spread all LEGO bricks in the mid-
dle. Start the first round by asking them:

Create a figure out of the bricks that reflects the last sprint.

Make them clear that there are no limits and that they can use as much bricks as they
want. As all characters in a team are different, some members will take longer than
others. Give everybody the chance to finish their first figure. Once everybody finished,
give everybody to chance to tell something about his figure. Let them start doing small
discussions in order to find out what exactly are the worries.

After this round, start the second round by asking them:

Create a figure out of LEGO bricks that represents the next important
step for the team in order to get better

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Make everybody clear that this is a solution-based question! Its not about what went
wrong So team members should think about a solution. Therefore, this session might
take a little bit longer.

After everybody finished his figure let everybody talk about it. As a facilitator you should
keep track on all information. Create Post-Its and make them part of the environment by
putting them on a wall.

Finally, its important to deal with the issues that where brought up. Focus the team now
on the Post its you wrote down and ask them what they want to do. If there are too many
different points, let them make a dot voting in order to focus on the most important issue.
The team members have to leave to room feeling that they have a concrete action point
they want to tackle.

With a little imagination, this exercise can be applied to remote team members also by
telling them to draw a picture on a white paper instead of creating a LEGO figure.

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Kudo Cards
by Luis Goncalves

Kudo Card is something so simple yet not often used in companies. Maybe its
importance is not enough highlighted. We use Kudo Cards at our clients projects
as well as among ourselves at Oikosofy.

A Kudo Card is a written public recognition of a colleague for something he has

contributed to the team. Kudo Cards are also called HERO awards, Rippas or Hugs.

We can even use it in Agile Retrospectives. Yes, Kudo Cards can be used as a single
exercise in Retrospectives! So why are they so relevant and important?

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

In our society, it is quite common to reward people with money for a good behavior. We
believe this might quite wrong if not used carefully. We believe there are other and better
ways to reward great behavior.

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Jurgen Appelo, for example, says:

There are many wrong ways to reward employees. A simple but effective approach is
the use of kudo cards, which enables people to give each other small tokens of
appreciation.

Through the use of this exercise, you can expect team members to feel appreciated by
each other. Often most of us are so busy with our daily activities that we forget to
appreciate what others do for us or for the team.

WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

The great thing about this exercise is that we do not even need to consider the right time
to do this exercise. This exercise can be done whenever the team wants.

It can be used in sprints where everything went well, or in sprints where everything went
wrong. In the first occasion it will serve as an extra boost to the teams motivation, in the
second one it will serve as a reminder that even during difficult times, team members
appreciate each other.

As an example we can bring up one of our clients that use this practice every sprint in
every retrospective. You can do this exercise at the beginning of the Retrospective as a
Set the Stage exercise, or at the end of the retrospective, aka the Closing Phase. It is
really completely up to the team.

As a summary, this exercise can be used every sprint as a way of appreciating good
behavior towards colleagues.

HOW TO DO IT?

Believe or not, there is nothing simpler to do than running this kind of exercise! In the
beginning or at the end of retrospectives (its your choice), you deliver Kudo cards to
people that you want to thank for their behavior during the sprint.

You can create your own cards and write whatever you want on them, or you can simply
buy Jurgens cards at Management 3.0 website; download them as A4 format.

Picture source: Management 3.0

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The 12 Principle Ice-Breaker
by Luis Goncalves

Agile is a set of values and principles that are expressed through methodologies, tools,
practices and behaviors. If you are implementing methodologies without understanding
values and principles you are not going to get much out of it. In order to avoid Cargo Cult
Agile its good to do a reality check from time to time against Agile Values and Principles.
Some organizations start by doing Scrum or XP, using physical boards and stickers but
nothing seems to change, and they blame Agile.

I am a firm believer that neither organizations nor teams should have the aim of
becoming agile. The aim is to be as successful as possible. So, while measuring how
strictly you are adhering to the principles of Agile is not the point, if you believe that an
agile approach, such as Scrum, is a viable means of becoming successful then assessing
yourself against its principles might not be a bad idea.

I am also a strong believer of principle number 10, which is SIMPLICITY, and I always
try to make retrospective and team exercises simple and straightforward, especially for
teams that are starting. When exercises are too complicated and extravagant people get
lost in the process and there is no flow.

I learned this simple and powerful exercise some years ago from the Agile community in
Spain, but I am not sure if it has a name. Thats why I decided to call it The 12 Principles
Ice-breaker. You can use this simple exercise to create awareness on how your team or
organization is adhering to agile principles.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

The intention of the exercise is harmless, as its objective is to allow the team to reflect on
some characteristics of Agile to see where they think they can improve. This is basically
an exercise to create awareness that you can later use to invite to reflection and action.

Despite its simplicity, it delivers a lot of information, which you can use to run a full
retrospective. This is especially important when the team is new to each other and the
members are not yet comfortable expressing their feelings openly, you can get a rough
idea of what each other think about their level of agility that can be the spark of a nice
conversation.

Some teams havent ever seen or cant remember the agile principles. Thats concerning.
This exercise helps you to reveal the overall agile health of teams

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 WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

This exercise might be suitable when the scrum master/agile coach feels that the team
does not have the same opinion about the practices applied within the team. This is a
good exercise to reveal individuals opinions, allowing a common understanding about
what the others think. This is important because team members must be aligned. For
example, if some team members think their level of automation is good but others do not,
there is no way the team will work together to improve this topic.

This technique might also work for situations when a team wants to better understand
how well they are implementing agile practices. This exercise will not solve specific
problems that occurred during the iteration, but might reveal why those problems
happened. For example, a team that finds a lot of bugs during development might learn
that their unit testing or automation practices are not well implemented.

You can also use this technique as part of the Team Launch for teams or organizations
new to Agile.

HOW TO DO IT?

Easy.

1. Ask the team about the twelve Agile principles. If they know it jump to the next point,
if they dont do a brief introduction to Agile values and principles (3 minutes at most)
2. Ask all team members to stand up
3. Read loud and clear the twelve Agile principles. For each one of them, any team
member that thinks the team is accomplishing the principle should remain standing
up, but if they think they are not fulfilling the principle they should sit down
4. Keep reading until everyone is sitting down.

Most probably, after principle number 6 everyone is sitting down :)

This creates some awareness on teams maturity level. Now, its time for reflection.

If you use it as an ice-breaker you can facilitate a 5-10 minutes open conversation.

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If you want to do a focused retrospective, after this introduction, you can ask the team to
evaluate themselves against the 12 principles and select one to work during the session
and define improvement actions. For this, you can use a flipchart and create a chart like
this one below.

Source: Gerard Chiva

Visualizing the results will let a team appreciate where they stand. With the graphic in
front of them, they can decide which area they want to improve.

Like many other exercises, this one does not require collocation of the team, as
long as you have video and some kind of scoring and voting mechanism that everyone
can access.

Several months later you can repeat the exercise and compare results.

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The Mutant Star Fish
by Stefano Porro

The mutant Star Fish is my personal customization of the famous retrospective exercise
called Star Fish. It adds to the typical three questions of the original exercise: What Went
Well? What did not go so well? What should be improved? Another question focused on
the team: Why is important to me work in this team?

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

This exercise helps, like the original one, to identify problems and opportunities for the
team using a simple visualization method. And moreover it permits you to identify the
individual needs of the team members. While the original exercise focuses (correctly) on
the team, this customization helps the team to also understand the individual needs.

Typically, we have five sections

1. Stop: In this section, team will bring the activities that dont bring any value waste
2. Less: Here team will bring the activities that need to be reduced because they require
a high effort but dont bring as much value as they expect
3. Keep: Activities that the team wants to keep and already performed. These are
activities where effort and value produced are balanced
4. More: Activities not so often performed but very valuable. The team could decide to
adopt these activities more often to boost their performance
5. Start: new activities decided by the team to bring more value. We can say these
activities are experiments.

Now we add another section and we can call it as we want: WII-FM (What Is In For Me),
Coolness, Amazing. Name this section with a word (or a little sentence) that can help the
team members to understand that this section is made to gather their individual
sentiments and needs. Because we are working as a team, and a team is made by
individuals!

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 WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

I suggest using this exercise with teams that are new to Scrum (or Agile, generally). When
people are new to Scrum, they are looking for their motivation. Focusing the exercise to
both team performance and individual needs can help them to create a climate of
selfmotivation. They will understand that we are working as a team but we will never
forget the single persons in the team. When a team starts with Scrum, team members
are looking for a motivation to start this journey. In this way we ask them for it explicitly.

HOW TO DO IT?

First of all draw a picture like this:

STOP LESS

WII-FM START

MORE KEEP

Source: Stefano Porro

Im sure you all know how to use this schema (except the new section).

Anyway, lets see quickly how to use this retrospective exercise.

Ask the team to use about three minutes to gather, individually, ideas for the STOP
section (they will use post-its to dump on the flip-chart). After that, use 10 minutes to
make the members read loudly from their post-its and to align all team members,
discussing about those ideas.

Repeat the same for the LESS, KEEP and MORE sections.

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For the START section ask your team to vote for a single subject. In this way you can
make them focused on a single topic, probably the most important to them. So study a
strategy with the team so this idea will be well implemented. The strategy is helpful
because to know if an implementation is successful, you need success criteria.

Luis Gonalves says that the order in which you put the sections in the flip-chart is
important (as important as the order in which you ask for them) and I totally agree. In
addition, I put START and WII-FM in the two bigger sections (at least for an optical
illusion) and I underline the words. In this way the team will concentrate more on the
positive things. A little bit of psychology.

So, we have gone trough the START and we proceed almost to the closure of the
retrospective. At this point the team would have talked about the team process: now its
the moment to talk about the individual needs and performance.
Ask the team members to write something on post-its in five minutes (give them a little
bit more time) and after that ask who will be the first to present his/her post-its.

Team members have to read loudly from their post-its and then explain their meaning
briefly. After everyone reads his or her ideas, the Scrum Master will re-analyze all the
post-its to understand if all things are clear. The action from these post-its its wont be
implemented for the next sprints, but theyll give the team the possibility to explain what
they are looking for to know about Scrum and the possibility of the Scrum Master to
adapt his work in a twofold manner: team performance and individual performance. For
example the Scrum Master could identify people who are having problems in the
company so he or she can act quickly to avoid transitions.

This exercise, moreover, helps not to lose the focus on WHY we are using Scrum,
and this is a very important thing to remember. Developers wouldnt be so impressed
by numerical motivations (ROI, etc.) but you, as a Scrum Master, must find the right
key to motivate them. And in this way theyll help you to discover the key to their success.

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DAKI Agile Retrospective Exercise
by Mario Lucero

What DAKI-Agile Retrospectives Exercise Mean?

D for Drop: What do team members want to drop (or remove) that bothers you? For
instance, a Scrum team wants to remove weekly meeting with his manager, because
he was doing a micromanaging.

A for Add: What are team members interested in to improve the process? For instance, a
Big Screen to check the code in pre-production environment or weekly breakfast to share
a good moment with the team.

K for Keep: What do team members like that they want to keep it? An example could be
that a team decides to announce the beginning of each Stand up meeting with a different
song chosen by each team member.

I for Improve: What do team members want to improve? A good example is as following:
A team decides to reduce the technical debt from a legacy code because they dont like
to fix bugs all day long. Therefore, they propose to have twenty per cent of each Sprint
Backlog dedicated to refactor the code that was affected in their user stories.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

You can expect a good feedback from the Scrum team about the process and issues
that they have faced.

WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

This exercise is good to use after several sprints working with the same team members.
Why? Because the idea is to use Scrum for a while in order to grow up as a team so they
are able to propose some changes to the process.

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 HOW TO DO IT?

Duration: 30min

Introduction: Take 5 minutes to explain what is the mechanism behind the exercise
using examples that have not happened in the company (just to avoid bad feelings).

Request ideas for Drop (five minutes), Add (five minutes), Keep (five minutes) and
Improve (5 or 10 minutes).

You can take advantage of the ideas proposed as Improve to consider them as Action
items to follow up or transform the ideas posted in Improve into Action items.

See example below:

D(Drop) A(Add)

Micromanaging (weekly meeting Unit Test TDD

with the manager) Peer Review

K(Keep) I(Improve)

Weekly team breakfast User stories has to be more

Good working environment independent
Self-organize team

Source: Mario Lucero

Action Items (from the example above):

According to the idea of user stories have to be simpler, the Scrum Master must help
the Product Owner to check the dependencies of each user story into the Sprint Backlog.
Scrum Master schedules a meeting with the manager (who still works in a command and
control mode) and the team to explain they dont need a weekly meeting. If he wants to
know the progress of the Sprint, the manager should check the physical board.

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An Energizing Retrospective Plan
by Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves (The Growing Agile)

Source: Paul Downey

If you have retrospective regularly you will know that they each have a different feel.
Some are serious, some are fun, some look far back, and some are about other areas
and not the team. Occasionally we want to have a retrospective that will leave us
energized and super excited to get going on actions. Here is a plan we follow at
Growing Agile for an energizing retrospective:

Check-in [3 min per person]

We have sticky notes with the following headings: Be Brave, Be Kind, Be Yourself, Be
Involved, Be Amazing, Be Accepting. You could make your own or use colors to represent
different things. Each person writes up one statement per sticky note about the past
month (or sprint) and then everyone shares what they wrote for each.

Gather Data [15 min]

A variation on the perfection game. We score the month out of 10 (where 10 would be
perfect) and each list 3 things we would have liked to have happened in the last month.
Depending how many people are in the retrospective you can reduce the 3 things down,
in the next section you dont want more than 15 in total.

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Generate Insights [30 min]

A discussion about the 3 things each person listed, why those would have made
the month better. Consider these questions:

What was lacking and why?,

What experiments have we done recently?,

What have we done for ourselves recently?

Decide what to do [30 min]

Look at the list of 3 things each person wrote as missing, and any other data you
have on things youd like to do, maybe an improvement backlog.
Each person picks 1 thing they really want to do next month, and shares it.
Give people an opportunity to give feedback on why you would or would not want
to do some of those actions.
Now dot vote to pick the top action.

Once you have a top action, create an action task board by breaking it down into
tasks that are small enough they could be done immediately by any one person.
This is key to making the action exciting. If you see something you could do straight
away you are more likely to get started.

Close [1 min]

Stick up your action task board and get cracking!

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Pictionary
by Jason Cusack

Source: Jason Cusack

Practice team I work with looks for creative ways to breathe life back into stale
retrospectives. They love to embody techniques that require engagement from the
WHOLE team, and prevent a few strong personalities from taking over the session.
Teams get bored when they have run the sailboat six sprints in a row. They get even
more bored when the cadence reverts to what went well and what did not go well.
Its easy for teams to go through the motions when retrospectives get boring, and
their suite of retrospective techniques will definitely prevent boredom from creeping
into your teams mindset.

This technique is what they call Pictionary, and requires your team to rely on
their art skills to convey improvement opportunities throughout the sprint.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

When you first pitch the idea, expect to see smiles, eye rolls, and nervous laughter.
Teams will be outside of their retrospective comfort zone, which will help them be
vulnerable to each other, and help create some team bonding. At a minimum, they can
rally around how much they dislike you as a scrum master (or facilitator) for a few
moments, before they realize how much they will laugh with each other over the
next 57 minutes.

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 WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

My team likes using the following pairing to help invoke a more collaborative session:

Pair 1: DEV member and QA member

Pair 2: Senior and Junior member of team

Pair 3: Team members that do not like each other, or have had conflict in the past

Pair 4: New team member with seasoned team member

These are just examples of how you can create teams, but we encourage you to create
teams with sprint team members in any fashion that helps spark a fun conversation.

HOW TO DO IT?

2 min Give a quick overview of the history of strange art, perhaps highlighting
Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Vincent Van Gogh or any other artist you want to
discuss. You can also show pictures that can be interpreted in 2 different ways, and are
both correct based on the perception of the person looking at the image (google:
candlestick or two faces, for an example).

2 min Pick teams. You can do this by random draw (put everyones name in a pile of
folded paper), or you can create teams on the fly, by pairing people up of your
choosing. Teams of 2 or 3 team members are often the most optimal size. But you can
make them bigger if necessary. You can have 5 or 6 drawings per session to review.
Any less than that, and you might not be highlighting enough about your sprint.

10 min Tell teams they can draw ANYTHING related to a challenge, improvement,
gripe, observation, or item they would like to have changed about the most sprint or
release. Teams are permitted to present up to two drawings, per each team. As teams
finish, tell them to fold their paper so people do not get distracted by craning their neck
to see what everyone has drawn. There will be laughter. Lots of it. Throughout these 10
minutes.

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30 min Go one team at a time, and allow them to present their drawing(s) to the
group. The rest of the team NOPT presenting the drawing, must guess what the picture
represents within the context of the sprint. The Scrum Master (or Facilitator) will write
down ideas on a wall as teams begin guessing. These topics will become the list of things
the team will vote on at the end. Spend about 5 min per drawing to get ideas about what
it is. If someone guesses the correct meaning, the team presenting the drawing may ac-
knowledge the correct answer has been given. If after 5 minutes no one has guessed the
correct meaning, the team will share what they drawing represents.

Source: Jason Cusack

10 min After all drawings have been presented, and all guesses have been shared, tally
up the guesses and look for themes. People will often guess issues, challenges or
improvements they would like to see addressed, so its a good way to get a mix of ideas
that can be used as a manner to collect votes at the end of the session. If people
draw the same item, you may not need to collect a bunch of other ideas as a theme
may be obvious. But its always fun to collect guesses and SAVE the pictures. Other
teams will hear about this, and will want to see the drawings.

5 min Close out the retrospective with votes on what the team would like to see
changed. Whether you quickly come up with a solution at the end of the retro, or whether
problem identification is the end goal you strive for (with experiments to be run the next
sprint), is entirely up to you.

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ROI Agile Retrospective Exercise
by Luis Goncalves

For many years I have been doing Agile Retrospectives and I have found some
difficulties in getting real feedback in my sessions. After using this exercises things
changed! This exercise is a variation of typical Return of Time Invested (ROI) exercise
that you can find in Agile Retrospectives from Diana and Esther.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET OUT OF THIS EXERCISE?

What you can get out of this exercise is very simple. This exercise allows you to get
qualitative and quantitative feedback in your sessions. There are several exercises out
there that are used to rate the quality of products or services. Usually these methods are
quantitative, meaning that you have a scale and you choose a number within the scale.
The problem with these methods relies on the fact that users cannot really give
qualitative feedback.

If you use these kind of systems you might get a 5 star service, but what was so good
about the service? What did you really like? On the other end, if you get 1 star what was
so bad about the service? With quantitative systems you get very little information about
the product or the service.

With the exercise that I am presenting here, you will not have this problem.
This exercise will provide you quantitative and qualitative information that will allow
you to create great Agile Retrospectives in the future with the feedback you will collect
from the participants.

WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS EXERCISE?

I use this exercise every time I want to collect feedback from a session that I ran. Of
course, in this program we are talking about Agile Retrospectives, so you can use this
exercise when you want to close your Agile Retrospective and you are interested in
getting feedback from your participants.

One of the biggest advantages of this exercise is that people do not need to speak,
this is specially good with teams of introverted people. Many times people tell me
that is very hard for them as facilitators to get people to give feedback or even speak.
But one thing that I found out: when you ask them to write their opinions, they are very
imaginative.

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So if you think about this, this exercise is great to use with any team, but I believe its
exercise is especially good if you have an introverted team. They will feel comfortable
with writing their true feedback giving you the opportunity to improve for the next session.

HOW TO DO IT?

To do this exercise the only thing you need is a Flipchart, post-its for each
team member and markers.

Draw on a graphic with two axis on the flipchart.

Axis X: Value
Axis Y: Fun

Split the graphic in 4 different parts:

Boring/No Value
Boring/Great Value
A Lot of Fun/No Value
A Lot of Fun/Great Value

An example can be seen below:

Source: Luis Goncalves

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After having the graphic on the Flipchart simply ask your team members to think
where they would like to put their vote. Give them couple of minutes to think about it.
When they are done, ask them to write the reason on a post-it why the chose that
quadrant. This part is very important, because it is what will give you the feedback
that you can use for your next session.

It does not really matter if they spent great time and they got great value. If you
do not know what made the session a great success, this is why you ask people to
write the reasons on a Flipchart.

In case you are interested in Agile Retrospectives, Im at the moment preparing AGILE
RETROSPECTIVES PROGRAM https://products.lmsgoncalves.com/agile-retrospectives-
training-comingsoon

This is a complete self-study program where you will learn everything that you need to
become a great Agile Retrospectives facilitator.

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 10
RETROSPECTIVES

E X E R C I S E S