Hello and welcome! I'm here to take you on a journey through sprint retrospectives. Now,
once upon a time, there was a team of SQL wizards, DevOps clerics or maybe more like
DevOps Blake neges, and this team really enjoyed using sprint retrospectives to think back
what went B. wail back in their sprint, what didn't go so well in that sprint, and use
that data to try to avoid making mistakes in the future.
[laughter]
Now, this format of what went well, what didn't go so well, what to keep doing, is a format
that most people use for their sprint retrospectives, but this team grew tired of this old format.
So they decided to go on a quest! To find a better retrospective format.
And we call this: The retro of retros! Now, this is how this worked. Each member of the
team split up, went out into the world to try to find a different type of retrospective
format to use and try, and now, over the course of about, say, a quarter or so, each member
of the team took turns, leading a sprint retrospective, and they used all of the different types of
formats that they went out and got. So they would switch over format and format
until they found some that they liked. Now, some of the formats that they tried include
the Three Little Pigs, so for this format, the team drew on a white board a house of
straw, house of wood and house of bricks and then the team took turns writing down aspects
of their tech stack that they would consider to be in the house of straw, wood, or brick.
And then this helped the team determine things that they felt really good about in their
tech stack versus things that they didn't feel so confident in their house of straws,
and now this really helped the team figure out what things they really needed to spend
more time working on versus what things maybe they could leave be for a little bit.
The next format that the team tried was the hot air balloon exercise. Now, in this exercise
the team drew a hot air balloon on a white board, but they also had different aspects
to think about. They drew over on the distance some sunny hot weather that they wanted to
get to, and then over on the other side, they drew some bad weather that they're trying
to avoid. And then at the bottom, they draw sandbags and those are the things that are
holding down the team. Now, I'm no expert on hot air balloons, but apparently hot air
balloons don't actually use sandbags? Only gas air balloons do, and I didn't know there
was even such a thing as a gas air balloon until I looked it up. But I am no expert.
Now, just for the sake of the exercise, what this team now has to do is think about aspects
of their tech stack or maybe even their team or maybe where they want to go to, so on the
sunny weather side, the team can think about what they want to accomplish, things that
they really want to get to, maybe that's better test coverage, maybe that's a better QA process,
and then over on the bad weather side, the team can think about things that they want
to avoid, and then for the sandbags, the team can really think about what things they feel
are holding them down, and this really gets you out of your typical retrospective format
of what went well and didn't go so well, and the team really gets to thinking more big-picture.
Now, another format that the team tried and this is a little bit different. It's really
more for the product owner or the Gandalph if you will
of the team. The team took turns nominating different user stories for the story Oscars
for say, best user story, most annoying user story and also coming up with categories of
their own. And now this exercise while it doesn't really get you to think about what
went well or what didn't go so well in this sprint, this gets the team to think more about
what they want to get out of a user story, so this exercise could be really helpful for,
say, a new product owner who's trying to figure out how what they want to get out of the team.
Lastly the other format is a confident versus apprehensive quadrant. In this exercise, the
team drew, well, a quadrant, and axis of confidence versus apprehension, and another axis of people
and tech. And now in this exercise the team plotted
different stickies on the board based on how they felt, so the team could say, I am confident
about this aspect of our tech tech stack or they could say I'm apprehensive about this
aspect of our technology. They could say I'm confident about our team leaders' ability
to push back on requirements or they could say I'm actually kind of apprehensive about
external stakeholders not giving us enough requirements up front and this is a little
different than your typical what went well, what didn't go so well format because it gets
you to think more about the tech and the people, which is what really makes software is tech
and people. So to wrap things up, once all of these different
formats were tried, the team got back together, and they talked and this is where the retro
of retros comes in. They had one more retro where they talked
about calling of the different aspects and formats that they tried, and then they voted
on which ones they really liked and which ones didn't work out so well.
And after this, the team decided which retro format worked best for them.
Now, you don't have to just stick to one format. You can even switch things up. So for example,
this team decided to use the hot air balloon exercise maybe once a quarter or so to get
them to think big-picture on a regular basis. But they don't really need to use that for
their sprint-to-sprint retro. So this is not just about changing the format of your current
retro because you're bored. This is also about figuring out a good way to address what your
team needs. So if your team really needs to think more big-picture, then maybe you can
use more of those types of retros to draw that out of your team and cementing this as
part of a team operating system also helps onboard new developers, because in that way
they'll understand what makes the team tick. Now, you can use all of this for your own
retro success, so if you need a little bit of help figuring out how to spice up your
retro, you can try some of these ol' tools such as fun retrospectives.com and retromat.org
and fun retro.io. If you have any questions. I'm Cecy Correa on Twitter. I'm happy to talk
to you about this exercise. Thank you.