Choosing the Right Activity for Your Sprint Retrospective
Design your Retrospectives to match the Sprint and state of the team.
It had been a difficult Sprint, but the morning before Retro was even harder. A bad merge had clobbered what we had been intending to deliver that Sprint. Cleaning up that mess had left me without time to prepare for our Retrospective. So for the Gather Data step, I fell back to one of my favorites activities— Lacked, Loved, Learned, and Longed For, otherwise known as the 4 L’s. Almost immediately, I could sense the team’s frustration. ‘Lacked’ didn’t even begin to describe the past two weeks, and they felt limited by the prompts I had picked.
Earlier in my Scrum Mastering, we had a really good streak of Sprints, and I was still new enough to be picking the activities I used to facilitate our Retrospectives at random. This Sprint, we landed on Mad/Glad/Sad; however, with everything running smoothly, there was nothing to be sad or mad about. Glad wasn’t encouraging the team to look for new opportunities for improvement. The Retrospective wrapped up early with the only action items being a couple of minor process tweaks.
All of the different activities that we assemble our Retrospectives out of aren’t just for varieties sake. Even when they are just a few different words, sentences…
