Iteration Review & Retrospective
Last Updated on Thursday, 28 October 2010 11:28 Written by Mike Cottmeyer Wednesday, 20 October 2010 01:17
This workshop is designed to help the team through their first or second review and retrospective. Using their real in-flight product release, the team will demonstrate their working software and compare how they did against their sprint commitment. They will get final acceptance from their product owner, and hopefully have the opportunity to learn from their experience building the emerging product. The team will learn how to conduct an effective retrospective, to create a safe environment for exploring issues and challenges, and look at how things went so they can help make things better.
Review Metrics – If you are not going to use metrics as a learning tool, don’t bother to collect them. If you are going to collect metrics, the sprint review is a good time to look at the numbers and see how you did.
Assess Progress Against Goals – The team set out to deliver a certain set of features and user stories at the beginning of the iteration, it is important that the team assesses their actual outcomes, see how they did, and learn from the two weeks they spent actually building the product.
Demonstrate Working User Stories – This is where the team gets to celebrate their accomplishment by showing off the product they built during the previous iteration.
Discuss Partially Completed User Stories – If something was started, but not finished, let’s figure out what we do with it. Does it get added to the next sprint, or but back onto the product backlog.
Discuss User Stories that were not Started – Same goes for the stuff that we didn’t start. Does it go back in the prioritized product backlog or added to the next sprint. I think we need to explain what happened and why we didn’t get done with what we expected to get done.
Accept the Iteration – Product Owner gets to decide of the sprint met their expectations. We’ll talk about how to make this acceptance a formality… this should be a no surprises meeting.
Celebrate – The team delivered a working product, it is a time for celebration!
Inspect and Adapt – Agile is about making everything visible and actively working to remove your impediments. We will learn techniques for surfacing the stuff that is getting in our way and learning how to actually do something about it. Of course, we will be working with real life situations from your real life product release.
Facilitation Techniques – Running an effective meeting is about beginning with the end in mind. If you are in trouble, it is most likely because you didn’t have a plan for staying out of trouble. We’ll explore techniques for setting up and running and effective review & retrospective.
Retrospective Techniques – Retrospectives every two weeks can get old, but we want to make sure we stay focused on continuous improvement. Here we will explore strategies for keeping your retrospectives fun and exciting and your team continuously learning.