Iteration 3 - Retrospective

A retrospective is a special meeting where the team gathers after completing an incremental of work to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork (Derby et al., 2006).  You will practice retrospective with a tool: postfacto.

This is retrospective for iteration 1 so "next iteration" means iteration 2, which is the ongoing iteration by the time this assignment is due. 

Before your retrospective, remember to finish the self-assessment survey.  The survey questions can help you understand the expectations of each practice so that you can discuss problems with your team in a retrospective more concretely.

To start a retrospective, go to your team's retro board.  You can find your team's board URL here.  The default password is gobears# and your team should change the password of your board.

You should follow the following steps to finish a retrospective:

1. Review action items from the last retrospective.  This step takes about 15 minutes.  You review if the action items are executed correctly and if the action item improves your team's productivity.  In cases where an action item is not done, you should discuss the reasons.
2. Each of you individually put the items that you want to discuss onto the retro board.  This step takes about 10 minutes.  Remember retrospectives are about solving problems and keeping the team productive.
3. Read and vote for the topics.  Each of you has three votes (you can increase or decrease this number based on the number of topics listed on the board).  This step takes about 3 minutes.
4. Discuss the topics following the order of votes.  This step takes about 20 minutes.  You do not need to finish all the topics.  For each discussed topic, one person explains this topic and the team discuss openly how the team can be more productive.  For problems, the goal is to come up with some action items to address the problems in the next iteration.
5. Review the action items.  This step takes about 5 minutes.

References

Derby, Esther, Diana Larsen, and Ken Schwaber. Agile retrospectives: Making good teams great. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006.