Jun/083
Problems On Sprint Retrospectives
I have tried using the sprint retrospectives a few times now, but it always transforms in to something else. Now in my experience the problems in the sprint retrospective are :
- Doesn’t happen often enough. If the sprint length is over 3 weeks people will just forget some of the problems. And so will managers too, they aren’t gods either – some problems cannot be even solved right away.
- Too formal. People stress about having a sprint retrospective -> there should not be any pressure or otherwise the meeting will not help, e.g. people won’t tell the truth or in worst case don’t say anything.
- Takes too long. These kind of things should be kept short, raise the negative and positive things and let the manager take action points on them. You can have meetings about the problems later on.
Solution that we came up was having an ‘opening session’ at the beginning of every week to talk raise negative and positive things.
I think many of the concepts in the Scrum are very good, but in order to really get them working concepts must be embedded inside different teams – and as we are humans we all are different from each other. There are different teams that require different approaching styles. I think that is very exciting, to get these concepts working you must first know the people inside the team. Remember that they are the ones that must modify the concept to their needs (People Over Tools & Processes). Do not try to change people to use these processes, it will probably just backfire, instead let the people modify the processes for their needs.
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9:22 pm on June 13th, 2008
A couple of comments:
- Timebox the meetings to 15-30 minutes.
- Ask only the three questions
- Post the answers in team space
- Always have them after every review.
This should solve problems 2&3.
However, I am concerned about the statement
“let the manager take action points on them.”
No wonder the meetings aren’t producing results! Let the team solve team problems. Get the manager out of there.
6:44 am on June 14th, 2008
True – that is what we are now doing with our weekly meetings, but on the sprint retrospective things tendeed last long as there were always many issues to be solved.
I think it is due many concurrent projects going on (2-4), and projects changing all the time (2-4 month projects mostly). The difference to long term projects is big, at least from my experience.
Yeah, we saw it better for us that the manager would take action points on (almost every) issues. It would take too much time from team members to solve the issues. They are always involved in a way or another. The manager is also part of the dev team doing programming.
11:43 pm on December 9th, 2008
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