Active learning cycle

Many teams seem to struggle with keeping track of their improvements from the retrospective. One really useful tool for that is the active learning cycle.

Take a sheet of flipchart paper and divide it into 4 areas: Keep, Try, Breaks and Accelerators. The most common form looks like this but you can always use a different form if it suits you better:

Active Learning Cycle

At the end of the retrospective you put your actions/improvements you decided on in "Try". Those are things that you want to try out. Remember to put the active learning cycle afterwards in a place where everybody can see it, near the team board would be a good place.

Not later than in the next retrospective you use to active learning cycle to decide what you want to do with the actions that are on the cycle.

• Did you like it and you want to continue doing it? Put it in "Keep" and keep on doing it
• Did you think it rather impeded you and you want to stop doing it? Put it in "Breaks". This could be things like "Standup at 2pm", "Digital team board", etc. And, more important: Stop doing it ;-)
• Was it something that helped you but which is nothing you can really keep on doing all the time? Put it in Accelerators. This could be things like "2-day team offsite" (It was an accelerator for the team, but you can't do a 2-day offsite every week).

You don't have to wait though, the active learning cycle is supposed to be a "living" artifact, so you can always move post-its around when you feel it's time to do so. Of course you can also move things from "Keep" to "Breaks" or "Accelerators" if at some point it isn't helping you anymore. Since your active learning cycle will be very full at some point you might have to remove post-its someday. The moment, when you remove something is totally up to you, but from my experience it's best to only remove them, when they've already become second nature to the team.

How to improve your retrospective

Marc Löffler did a session about "How to improve your retrospective" past weekend at agile coach camp 2013. Result was a list of possibilites what you can do to improve your retrospective and maybe sometimes vary the usual format as described in "Agile Retrospectives".

Since the results speak for themselves, I will just post the photos of the results here:

A christmas retrospective

This is a quite nice end-of-the-year-retrospective method I read about first last year on Boris Glogers blog. Since the original post is in german and doesn't tell you how to prepare, here is a detailed preparation instruction and the how-to itself, both in english. One warning ahead: Preparation for this one takes a lot of time. But it's totally worth it.

Time needed
Preparation: A few hours
Playing: 60 - 120 minutes, depending on your team size

Preparation
First of all take a flipchart paper (or something of at least similar size - depending on your team size you might need a larger sheet of paper, you will understand why later on) and draw a large christmas tree. Draw it as large as you can and don't forget the star on the top, after all you want the tree to look nice:

Now draw some small candles and christmas baubles in 2 colors. Draw one candle and 2 baubles for every team member. If you're lazy you can draw one candle and one bauble in each color and then copy it a few times (that's what I did ;-)

Once you have your candles and baubles finished, draw a present and a christmas sock for every team member and write their names on it. In order to keep the presents and socks individual you might want to not copy them ;-)

Cut out the candles, baubles, presents and socks. After that create a matrix putting the socks on the left of the tree and the presents under the tree:

Last part of preparation is to buy some cookies for the retrospective itself :-)

How to play

Give everyone a candle. Set the timer to 5 minutes and ask "What does motivate me getting up and going to work?". Everyone should write some words about the question on the candle (answers could be: I love our team, the current project is awesome, etc.). When the time is up everyone in turn glues her/his candle on the tree where her/his name crosses itself and says a few words about it. A glue stick might come in handy ;-)

Give everyone 2 baubles for every other team member. Set the timer to 10 minutes and ask them to write something about every team member. On one bauble they should answer the question "What did I like most about working with you?" (answer could be something like "I really liked pair programming with you") on the other "What do I hope I'll be able to be doing together with you next year?" (answer could be something like "I know you're really good at test driven development, so I hope you could teach me how to do it, at best while pair programming").

When you're done filling out the baubles, everyone in turn gets their presents. Let's assume you are the first to get your presents. Everyone in the team tells you what they wrote about you on their baubles and glue them at the corresponding positions in the tree-matrix (there are 2 for every combination). Once you have received all your presents, say a few words about how you feel and continue with the next person in your team.

Once you're finished, your tree should look like this:

Definition of done traffic light

This is a quite nice retrospective method I learned from agile42. Prepare the definition of done of your team by writing each point on a single line and put three columns besides every point. Paint the columns in red, yellow and green. The now colored columns stand for "We did that well" (green), "We did that ok" (yellow), "We didn't to that very good" (red).

In the retrospective every team member puts a dot in the colored column expressing his view on how good the team applied this point of the DoD. The result looks like this:

Now you can pick the 3 points with the lowest overall rating, discuss them (20 min timebox each) and develop optimisations for them.

You can do the same for your working agreements.

A different kind of retrospective: Story workshop

Yesterday I tried a different kind of retrospective: The story workshop. Instead of writing post-its answering "What was good?"/"What went wrong?" or Mad/Sad/Glad, you ask the team to do the following:

"Write a short story, a movie, a play or a comic about the last sprint"

The feedback from the attendees was very positive, the main statement being that you get a quite different look on the past sprint, when you try to draw it (everyone in the retrospective drew a comic).

One of the comics looked like this:

Histogram: Team communication

Based on the satisfaction histogram from "Agile Retrospectives - Making good teams great" (p. 64 - 67), I did a communication satisfaction histogram in our last retrospective.
To measure how the team thinks about the communication between each other they could choose between 5 states:

"The communication in our team is ..."

• 5: ... outstanding
• 4: ... mostly very good
• 3: ... satisfactory, but needs to be improved
• 2: ... bad and needs to be improved badly
• 1: ... a disaster

Team members vote anonymously, for scoring you can use dots:

I also left some space for further comments (write them on Post-Its and put them on the flipchart).