In this post, I will explain the exercise Happiness Index. This exercise can be found in the book: “Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives”, a book written by Ben Linders and me with the foreword from Esther Derby. The book can be downloaded by free in LeanPub.com or InfoQ.com, please download it and spread it within your colleagues.

This exercise is a combination of “Develop a timeline” and “Emotions Seismograph” from Norman L. Kerth.

If you are interested in getting some extra Agile Retrospectives exercises, I created a blog post with dozens of Agile Retrospectives Ideas, check them and see if you find something interesting.

What can you expect to get out of this technique
The purpose of this exercise is to draw a graphic representation of team members´ emotions during sprints, connecting their emotions to sprint events. With this kind of information, the team can identify what exactly affects its performance during the sprint. For example, if they have some problems with the build server, most probably the mood will drop because of the team frustration not being able to proceed with the work. This kind of exercise is a great way to represent team emotions within the sprint.

If you want to continue you can see the rest of the article on my blog: https://luis-goncalves.com/happiness-index-agile-retrospective/

My name is Luis Gonçalves and I am an Organisational Transformation Coachand I love to write about Agile Retrospectives, Agile Retrospectives Ideas, Scrum, the role Scrum Master, and Agile in general.

I have been creating Scrum Master Training for the agile community. If you are interested in knowing more or even working with me you can find me here: Agile Coach München.

Luis Gonçalves

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