This page contains a number of fun, effective scrum retrospectives. Of course you can also use it if you are not scrumming.
We know the sailing boat. The starfish too. Great retrospectives as far as I’m concerned. But there is also something to be said for variety. And a retrospective has more effect if it connects to the experiences of your team members. The retrospective is also the perfect opportunity to indulge yourself creatively as a scrum master.
Enough reasons to come up with retrospectives yourself. For inspiration a number of retro’s that were devised by LSD man Gerjon Zomer:
- Scrum values retrospective (how valuable are the scrum values?)
- Fail fast retrospective (making mistakes is allowed)
- The Mind retrospective (teamwork and fun)
- FC Scrum retrospective (onboarding new team or team member)
- Divide and Conquer retrospective (split work into chunks)
- Stock exchange retrospective (how agile are we?)
- AcceleRetro (how are we going to speed up?)
- Retrospectives for a distributed team (and when working from home)
- Extreme timeboxing (the usefulness of the timeslot)
Distributed teams
If your team works in two geographic locations (distributed team), good retro’s are a challenge. Based on his experiences, Gerjon Zomer sees five ingredients that contribute to more effective retrospectives. Read the LinkedIn article about this .
OTHER CUTE RETROSPECTIVES
- Spice up your retrospective . In this post from Barry Overeem of The Liberators, 11 ideas to make your retrospectives more fun and effective (especially when working from home).
- Stop-Start-Continuous . This classic is super simple and very effective at the same time. Divide a whiteboard into three columns and have the team members fill it with (post-its with) things to keep doing, things to start with and things to stop immediately.
- Predict the weather
Let your team members predict the ‘weather’ for the upcoming sprint using the five scrum values *. And above all: let them present their weather map as a true weather man or woman. Download the work instruction here . - Carsten Lutzen makes useful instructional videos for retrospectives and working methods on agile working.
RETROS COLLECTED
- Retrium.com | Nicely designed, flawless technique, but paid. And in our opinion more old wine in new bottles.
- You can find a nice overview with existing retrospectives on Retromat.org. All known retro’s in a row. Free . Often with useful photos.
* The original idea is from Barry Heins. You can read his post here: The Weather forecast retrospective. I also use my own variant that has ‘lands’ based on aspects of development work:
- Users: Involvement, UI, UX & content
- System: Speed, stability and safety
- Time: workload, deadline and % dev/ops/inc.
- Development: research, spikes, tech dept and re-work
- Teamwork: focus, pair programming, flow
