Damian PereraMonitoring & Evaluation Specialist| ChrysalisMellawagedara, Western Province, Sri Lanka
'A retrospective is not about blame; the retrospective is a time for the team to learn from previous work and make small improvements' - PMBOK 6th edition
Have you worked in agile development teams? What issues did you encounter while facilitating agile retrospectives? What steps did you take to overcome them? Saving Changes...
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Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
That is not new. Retrospective comes from an "ancient" technique named software inspection. It belongs to quality assurance. No matter that, the key thing is to understand that it belongs to quality which is one of the pillars of Agile. If you understand that it belongs to quality then you will manage it as other things in quality putting focus that is a matter of culture instead of process. Saving Changes...
Drew CraigSr. Agile & Product Coach| VanguardPhiladelphia, Pa, United States
I have found that some are afraid to open up and talk about the things either they did not find valuable or areas that needed improvement. My resolution to that is to work at providing a safe zone for the team members, where I clearly identify the retrospective as a way for ALL of us to improve on or continue doing things that are a positive influence to the team, project, and product.
There are many variations of the retrospective to keep it fun, engaging, and interesting. Saving Changes...
1. Finger-pointing instead of focusing on root causes for issues
2. Becoming complacent - many sprints in, the team feels they are perfect!
3. Coming up with too many ideas and not doing a good job of filtering them down to a vital few which are worth acting upon
4. Not following up on any of the ideas from the retrospective
5. Using the same recipe for each retrospective - BORING...
The solution for all of these is a vigilant agile lead/Scrum Master - their responsibility is to ensure that ceremonies add value and to encourage the team to inspect & adapt on an ongoing basis...
It becomes like a status meeting where the teams discuss without any solid points for improvement
Managers walk-in to the Retro saying that they just want to observe how it goes and teams don't open up due to the Manager's presence
Scrum Masters don't attend the Retro after few sprints assuming that the teams have become matured in Agile and no room for improvement any more.
Solution is to coach the teams, Managers & SM and make them understand why we have adopted Agile and it's not a fashion trend in the market. Saving Changes...
Vivek BhatiaPrincipal| The Bhatia GroupOakland, Ca, United States
"Managers walk-in to the Retro saying that they just want to observe how it goes and teams don't open up due to the Manager's presence "
Requoting Girija's point, this is common & fatal. I've had to tell certain leaders they are not welcome despite being the ones who pay the bills because of this. They get upset, and I stroke their egos saying "the problem is you're so powerful you could impact anyone's career. If you want to see how it's going, attend one of the daily standups". If they insist, I let them attend, and after the meeting I privately talk to them and bring up any issues I know about which didn't come up because they were there.
Rarely happens a second time. Saving Changes...
Joshua MillerProject Ops Support Analyst II| IGTTitusville, Fl, United States
I have been studying up on agile behavior. I see agile not as a methodology to follow but a tool to use in the Project progress. My company uses standard processes with a lot of upfront work on requirements changes are made through change management. What I see that we run up against is that you come to a point where you can't make changes is something is really out of place. This leads to after launch releases and post live batches to fix issues that couldn't be addressed during the project.
I think agile can help handle that but at the same time I think agile has it's own issues in not having some clearly defined requirements and scope. I think agile allows for a lot of scope creep if it is not managed properly. Saving Changes...
Damian PereraMonitoring & Evaluation Specialist| ChrysalisMellawagedara, Western Province, Sri Lanka
