Disciplined Agile

What is the point of the retrospective?

The retrospective is one of the most important ceremonies in all of agile.  This is the time the team spends together to assess how they are working together and define steps to improve that process.  It needs to be a “safe place” where people are able to speak openly and honestly.  This is their opportunity to air their dirty laundry and work through their inter-personal issues.  This is a time of growth for the team and for the team to take ownership of improvement.  The team lead will facilitating the retrospective and should manage the interactions to keep the environment safe.

Define the Team

If the retrospective is a team ceremony, then what do we mean by team?   The team includes: the team lead, the architecture owner and all other members that actively contributed to meeting the deliverables for the iteration.  This includes: developers, testers, BAs, QAs, or other specialists such as technical writers, database engineers etc.

What about the Product Owner (PO)?

The PO is NOT a member of the team.  They certainly interact with the team but they do not contribute to meeting the deliverables for the iteration so they are not a member of the team.  They are not allowed to participate in the planning poker for the user stories for the same reason.  The team votes because they are on the hook for delivering based on the sizing and the estimates but the PO is not on the hook, so they don’t get a vote.

Should the Product Owner participate in the retrospective?

In general, I would start by including the PO in the retrospectives because the team does have to learn and adjust to working with the PO. Keep in mind though that the PO may come and go but the team should stay together so it is most important that the team works well together.??As a coach, I usually talk to the PO beforehand to say that they are an invited guest and that it is a privilege to be part of the meeting so they should act accordingly.   I have been in many situations where the PO was welcomed at the retrospective, and felt left out if not included.  I favor building trust between the business (the PO is their representative) and IT (the team).  Including the PO in the retrospective can help the PO assimilate with the team.

I have also had several situations where as the coach I had to ban the PO from the retrospective because they were too commanding and disruptive in the meeting for the team to have an effective retrospective.  I have also seen many situations where the PO is also the resource manager of members of the team (which in itself is not recommended).  Having managers in the room can definitely have a dampening effect on the member’s willingness to be open and honest about problems and solutions.

If the PO doesn’t participate, at least as an observer, the team runs the risk of having to “sell” the cost of their improvement actions (against other backlog items) after coming up with them. Hopefully the PO is engaged enough with the team to understand its weaknesses and support improvement in those areas whether then attend the meetings or not.

Team Decision

Retrospectives are about improving the process, and a non-trivial part of that is optimization of collaboration between the PO and the team.  I would suggest that the team should decide whether or not to include the Product owner.

What about the Stakeholders?

The retrospective should absolutely be a closed door session for the stakeholders since the retrospective must be a “safe space”.

There was a twitter debate lately that talked about a team being subjected to “a drive by criticism from 2 PM’s during a Retrospective”.  This is a good reminder why we constrain attendance.  The “safe place” is affected by the presence of people with positional authority, potential agendas or other implicit impact.??The team may decide to invite such people – usually to ensure that they are communicating improvements needed that are beyond their locus of control.??Having outsiders as guests at the retrospective will change the dynamics but at least it is a team decision to do so.

It is very important that the team own their process.  If they’re uncomfortable that someone is in the room then that person should be asked to either change their behavior or leave (perhaps to be invited back in the future).??The coach should always be thinking along the lines of “do we have the right people in the room” and then act accordingly

Isn’t agile all about transparency?

There was a twitter debate lately that centered on transparency.  I believe that transparency is a key element to making agile successful.   I’m all for transparency in everything about agile; EXCEPT the retrospective!??Sometimes you need to have a family meeting outside of the public eye and that is the retrospective. The retrospective is all about resolving your issues in private so that you can present a united front to the rest of the world. To use a sports analogy, an NHL coach doesn’t invite the business (fans) into the dressing room between periods.  There are lots of other places for transparency; the retrospective doesn’t have to be one of them.

The output of the Retrospective

While the actual retrospective meeting is closed to other observers, I would suggest that the action items coming out of the retrospective need to be made public and posted as an information radiator for everyone to see.  The changes are more likely to get implemented if the team sees them every day.  The team may also want to “radiate” their improvement actions on their dashboard.

The actions and results of the actions may also be shared with other teams through what is often called a Retrospective of Retrospectives. I encourage teams to only choose one or two areas for improvement at a time to provide focus and make meaningful progress.

Retrospectives are a great way for teams to explore potential improvements to the way that they work.  A team will get together, discuss what is working well for them, what is not working so well, and hopefully identify ways that they could improve.  It’s this last activity that can be challenging.  You may know that your team is facing a problem but you might not understand your options.  For example, perhaps your team is struggling with the way that it is being funded.  The current funding mechanism is to estimate the cost up front and then allocate these funds to your team.  This motivates your team to be wary of changing requirements due to the fear of going over budget, something that decreases your ability to produce a solution that meets the true needs of your stakeholders.  You have suggested to management several times that a time and materials (T&M) approach would be more appropriate, but you have gotten nowhere with that conversation.

This is where DAD’s process goal-driven approach can help out.  In this case the goal Secure Funding provides some insight.  The process goal diagram, see below, along with the supporting descriptions of each technique, their advantages and disadvantages, and advice for when the technique is applicable can help your team to understand their options and hopefully argue for a better funding strategy.  Although a T&M approach might not be palatable to your financial team right now, perhaps they would be willing to consider a stage gate approach to funding.  Or, perhaps they would be open to a T&M approach but they just don’t understand the tradeoffs between T&M and fixed cost.  With DAD’s goal-driven approach the team can arm itself with the arguments that it needs to have a knowledgeable conversation with the actual decision makers.

Of course this is just one example.  The DA toolkit addresses a range of goals pertinent to successful agile solution delivery, all of which can provide team’s insight into potential process improvement options.  Knowing your options is an easy way to up your game during retrospectives.