The Lazy Faire

Practice #2: The Retrospective

A core practice of many Agile software teams is the retrospective.  This is a meeting held at the end of the iteration to look back over the iteration and discuss what went well and what could have gone better.   It’s not a witch hunt or a blame-fest.  The iteration is performed with the assumption that everything that was done (or not done) was done to the best of the participants’ ability at the time.   The idea is to use the insight gained from the retrospective to improve the next iteration.

We’ve incorporated retrospectives into our “agile living” practice at home.  We schedule one at the end of each three-week iteration.  When it’s time for the iteration, we pack up our 3×5 cards and sticky notes and head to a restaurant or cafe.  This part is important: we want the retrospective to be a treat, not a chore.  And we want to be on neutral ground, without the usual distractions of home.

Once there, with drinks in hand, we begin the retrospective.  We start with statistics.  Referring to the planning cards form the iteration that is ending, we list:

• How many points’ worth of effort we planned
• How many points’ worth of effort we accomplished
• How many points’ worth of effort we failed to accomplish

We don’t dwell on the ratio of accomplished to not-accomplished.  The numbers are just a way, over time, to get a feel for how much effort we are capable of accomplishing in a three-week period.

Then we discuss three things:

• What went well
• What didn’t go so well
• Ideas

For each category I put a sticky note down on the table.  We move through these three categories roughly in order, but it doesn’t have to be a strict progression.  As we think of things that went well, things that didn’t go so well, and ideas for the future, we scribble them down on a 3×5 card and lay the card down under the appropriate sticky.

What went well

E.g. “spent a lot of quality time with the kids” or “felt really energetic”.  These are the things we felt good about over the course of the iteration.  They could be things we accomplished, good things that happened in our lives, or just positive feelings.

What didn’t go so well

E.g. “didn’t get enough sleep” or “the basement flooded”.  

Ideas

This category is for ideas for future iterations.  It’s pretty wide-open:  it could be specific projects or tasks, or daily practices to try out, or new strategies for tackling tasks that we didn’t do so well at in the preceding iteration.

Conclusion

Eventually we stop thinking of new items to add to the three stacks, at which point we wrap up the iteration.  I collect the three card stacks and transcribe them online as soon as practical.

Rationale

The goal of the retrospective is reflection.  It’s a way of being mindful as a family, and hopefully of bringing our unconscious joys, concerns, impediments, and ideas to conscious attention.  This gives us a chance to re-create circumstances that worked well, minimize conditions which caused us pain, and to think as a family about how we approach our daily challenges.