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The agile mindset Retrospective
Test yourself and your team if you are enhancing or sabotaging your agility.
A couple of weeks ago we had our most impactful Retrospective Meeting. It was a true eye-opener for us, which changed a lot about how we see ourselves. After the Scrum Retrospective, we changed a lot in our behavior.
Agile is something we do, not something we are. This is something I can not stress enough.
Agile is a collection of beliefs, it is a set of principles and values. When you understand agile it is surprisingly flexible. Agile doesn’t make decisions for you, but it helps you to make the right decision by providing this foundation of beliefs, values, and principles.
The question is, are you doing the “right” “agile” things? Let’s find out — here is my story of the Retrospective we had.
What we did
This is how we structure our Retrospective Meetings:
- Fresh-up and reminder — What is the purpose of a Retro — Yes I know everyone knows why but it is good to repeat.
- Ice Breaker —Something fun everyone can contribute
- Learning Part —Here we discuss special learnings, do a quiz or talk about Scrum and agile in general or in detail.
- Reflect, Inspect and Adapt — We look at the past Sprint, at numbers and metrics, and the Sprint Goal and do a Retro-Format like
- Mad Glad Sad,
- Liked Lacked, Learned, Longed for,
- Drop, Add, Keep, Improve
- Bad, Good, Ideas, Actions
For the Learning Part we normally plan 10–15 minutes, but this time it took us a lot more time because the quiz lead to a long discussion which kind of replaced the last structured Retro-Format. But in the end, we learned and adapted a lot with this Quiz we started.
The Quiz:
I, as the Scrum Master and Agile Coach of the Team, asked the team to rate the following statements from 0 (We are not doing this at all) to 10 (We live this perfectly).
- We strive for perfection and precision.
- We discuss Backlog Items in detail before we implement them.
- We only discuss Backlog Items in Refinement…
