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Set the stage

String Theory (#129)

Surface shared traits and mutual interests among team members
Source: Eben Halford
This is an excellent activity for newly formed teams of 6 to 15 members. It speeds up team building by sharing traits and interests so that team members can build closer bonds than possible with just work-related stuff.

Have the team form a circle with everyone looking inwards. Leave about a foot of space between people. Depending on what you want to stress with this activity, you can ask colleagues that usually work remotely to stand about 5 feet away from the circle.

Hand a ball of yarn to a random player and tell them to hold on tight to the end of the yarn with their non-dominant hand and the ball in the dominant one. The yarn holder starts the game by saying something about themselves that is not work-related such as 'I have a daughter' or 'I play the guitar'. If this statement is true for any other team member they raise their hand and say 'Yes, that's me'. The yarn holder passes the ball to the person who raised their hand. If there's more than one, the yarn holder can choose one. If no one shares the statement the yarn holder has to make another statement.

The person who received the ball of yarn holds on to the thread and tautens it. This is the first connection in a network of shared traits. The new yarn holder now makes a statement about themselves, passes the ball while holding on to their part of the yarn and so on.

The game ends when time is up OR everybody has at least two connections OR the yarn runs out.

You can debrief with some of these questions:
  • What did you notice?
  • If you've got remote people: How does it feel to stand apart? How does it feel to have someone stand apart?
  • How do you feel about few (or no) connections?
  • What is it like to see this web of connections?
  • Can you be a team without this web?
  • What would happen if someone let go of their threads? How would it affect the team?
  • Is there anything you will do differently at work now?

This activity is only the first part of a longer game.
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Gather data

Avoid Waste (#135)

Tackle the 7 Wastes of Software Development
Source: Tony O'Halloran
This activity facilitates a broad discussion around waste, using the 7 Wastes of Software Development from Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.

Prepare the room with 7 flip-chart sheets, each representing a category of waste. Be sure to give enough room for small groups to stand around them, so spread the sheets out across the room!

The 7 categories of waste are:
  1. Partially Done Work
    Is work going from beginning to end in a single rapid flow? For example; are you building up large amounts of untested or undeployed work? Do you have long-lived feature branches?
  2. Extra Features
    Do your customers or users actually need what you’re building?
  3. Relearning
    Do you spend a lot of time rediscovering what you (or someone else on your team) already knew at one time?
  4. Handoffs
    Is your team truly collaborating, or handing off bits of work to each other, losing tacit knowledge in the process?
  5. Delays
    Does work typically spend lots of time stalled awaiting things like environments, someone to be available, or decisions to be made?
  6. Task Switching
    Do you find that you lose time to context switching frequently?
  7. Defects
    Does your team have a low defect rate? How late in the development process do you find defects? Could this feedback loop be shorter?
To start, briefly describe each of the different types of waste (more in-depth information here). Then pose the core questions:

In which situations do we incur this type of waste?
Where do we do a good job of avoiding this type of waste?

Break into groups of 2-3 people, preferably with a mix of roles in the groups. This helps to build awareness of the waste everyone else is dealing with on your team. Then, each group selects their first topic and spends a short amount of time writing post-its to answer the two questions above. Limit it to 2 or 3 minutes per topic and 2 post-its per person for each topic to avoid getting swamped with data. When the timebox is up, each group cycles to the next category until everyone has had an opportunity to contribute to each.

What themes are emerging? What do participants notice? Use dot-voting to decide which topics are important enough to further discuss in the next phase.
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Generate insights

The Worst We Could Do (#69)

Explore how to ruin the next iteration for sure
Source: Corinna Baldauf
Hand out pens and sticky notes. Ask everyone for ideas on how to turn the next iteration / release into a certain desaster - one idea per note. When everyone's finished writing, hang up all stickies and walk through them. Identify and discuss themes.
In the next phase turn these negative actions into their opposite.
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Decide what to do

Three by Three (#125)

Build on each other's ideas to create a great action item
Source: Simon Tomes
This silent brainstorming technique helps the team come up with truly creative solutions and gives quiet people equal footing:

  • Everyone writes 3 sticky notes with 1 action idea each
  • Go around the room and pitch each idea in 15 seconds
  • Gather all stickies so that everyone can see them
  • Each team member adds their name to the sticky note that inspires them the most
  • Take off all ideas without a name on them
Repeat this process 2 more times. Afterwards, everyone can dot vote to determine which action(s) the team is going to implement.
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Close the retrospective

Debriefing Cube (#138)

Close with a reflective question from the Debriefing Cube and cards
Source: Chris Caswell and Julian Kea
A good debriefing deepens understanding, learning and sharing. Preparation: Download and assemble the Debriefing Cube and cards. During the retrospective, roll the cube. Then draw a card from the category it shows and use it to prompt a discussion. Repeat as time permits. This will broaden your debriefing options and is especially great for groups without a facilitator to enable them to effectively debrief on their own.
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Retromat contains 127 activities, allowing for 8349005 combinations (25x30x22x22x23+5) and we are constantly adding more.

Created by Corinna Baldauf

Corinna wished for something like Retromat during her Scrummaster years. Eventually she just built it herself in the hope that it would be useful to others, too. Any questions, suggestions or encouragement? You can email her or follow her on Twitter. If you like Retromat you might also like Corinna's blog and her summaries on Wall-Skills.com.

Co-developed by Timon Fiddike

Timon gives Scrum trainings. He mentors advanced scrum masters and advanced product owners. Human, dad, nerd, contact improv & tango dancer. He has used Retromat since 2013 and started to build new features in 2016. You can email him or follow him on Twitter. Photo © Ina Abraham.