Conducting Release Retrospectives in Agile Development

In this post Bill and I discuss the concept of release retrospectives that I briefly touched on in the blog overview.

Bill: You mentioned how you turned a software development retrospective on its head and discussed what went right rather than what went wrong. This is a nice twist on lessons learned and should encourage participation and engagement. After all what you want to repeat is what went right. So let’s have the details.

Jeff: This project had been going for six months. I talked with management about having a release retrospective. Most people are familiar with having a retrospective after each iteration or spread. This usually occurs about every four weeks for an hour or two with each team doing this independently. But we also recommend that after longer periods, say after a major milestone is reached, two practices. First, the teams take a week off and stop the sprinting and breathe for a bit. And second, the teams have a more relaxed release retrospective.

In the book Agile Retrospective, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen talk about the need for the shorter sprint retrospectives while you are still in the fray. These typically last one hour or so and involve one team. In contrast, the release retrospective involves the whole group of teams and takes a longer look.

Bill: What was the problem that set up this release retrospective? Why did you do it?

Jeff: The problem is a generic one. People need time if they are going to learn. One of the Agile tenets is that teams need to be able to learn and reflect. The release retrospective is looking at it from a longer time perspective and from the perspective of all the teams on the project. Typically problems are solved at the individual team level. So as we move to the multiple team level I am a little less concerned with specific problems and more concerned with attitude and making sure that people feel they are on a larger project where teams are working together.

The heads down sprint-to-sprint activity in a team can be very focused and sometimes isolating. It can be harder to come up and breathe. So in the release retrospective there are discussions at a higher level about such things as the vision for the next six months or big changes that are being considered. People can reestablish the larger context that they are working in.

There is a type of inquiry called appreciative inquiry that is a technique for exploring issues that allows people to focus on solutions and positive aspects of their experiences. It is referred to as the discipline of positive change. There is some data in research that indicates that larger groups of people who focus on things that work and spend less time on problems such as we typically do in our industry, people feel better, are more productive, and their customers are happier. I was exposed to this research and I thought it might be interesting to bring this approach into the retrospective.

Here is what we did.

First we had everyone introduce themselves and provide a fact about themselves that they felt no one else knew. This activity helped establish a relaxed atmosphere.

We we used a time line. We had put a 20 foot roll of brown paper on the wall and listed key events during the six months (e.g., the big snow storm, the hiring of key people). Then in the retrospective individuals put on the key events that mattered to them. We ended up with this long time line with all these sticky notes that documented the things that mattered to individuals.

As each person put up a note they told the group about the event. This generated lots of laughing and feeling that they were together on this thing. It was fun, interesting and informative.

Next we added a temperature reading. People went along and added below the time line their memory of their general feeling at that time.. This is a technique where people say things like I was feeling really good about things here and not so good here and all that. All thirty five people did this. In this particular time line case was only one situation were there was an alignment of feelings. Everyone felt bad when we slipped a date by three weeks. Other than that some people were up and others were down at any particular time. People began to realize to that people were different. People enjoyed this.

Next, we had people tell stories about when they worked on teams that went really well and they loved the experience. This is appreciative inquiry technique.

Bill: Do you mean they told stories about events not just on this project but in general?

Jeff: Yes, in general. Some people called out things on the project. Some people called out things from the other parts of their life. This was fascinating as well. We told stories in small groups of five. Each group picked the best story to present to the larger group. As the stories were told we abstracted out the commonalties. We recorded what were the things that mattered.

A this point in time we were at five hours since we had had breaks and lunch. People were feeling jazzed. They felt they had heard what was important from each other and had expressed what was important to them. So we quit early which always makes people feel good. Hopefully, I will have a chance to go back to the same group after another major cycle and continue this.

People came up to me afterwards and said they had been very worried that we were going to spend six hours talking about what went wrong in the prior six months. There was even one guy who did not come into work that day and started the session on the phone. He got so interested that he drove in to participate live and be more involved. The most senior person there was excited as he valued building a cohesive team. Everyone was pleased with the reverse in expectations.

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Agile development and the broader issues of team dynamics that go beyond Agile and software. Jeff is an Agile evangelist for Serena Software and long time participant in Agile and preceding modes of software development.