Planning your next agile retrospective? Start with a random plan, change it to fit the team's situation, print it and share the URL. Or browse around for new ideas!

Is this your first retrospective? Start here!
Retromat Miroboard Mega Template
Are you running your retrospectives with Miro? Create prettier boards faster with the giant Retromat Miroboard Mega Template!

Check out the Mega Template
Retromat.org – by Corinna Baldauf
Plan-ID:
Replaced by JS
◄
Set the stage

Temperature Reading (#22)

Participants mark their 'temperature' (mood) on a flipchart
Source: Unknown
Prepare a flipchart with a drawing of a thermometer from freezing to body temperature to hot. Each participant marks their mood on the sheet.
►
◄
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.
►
◄
Gather data

Mad Sad Glad (#7)

Collect events when team members felt mad, sad, or glad and find the sources
Source: Agile Retrospectives
Put up three posters labeled 'mad', 'sad', and 'glad' (or >:(, :(, :) alternatively). Team members write down one event per color coded card, when they've felt that way. When the time is up have everyone post their cards to the appropriate posters. Cluster the cards on each poster. Ask the group for cluster names.
Debrief by asking:
  • What's standing out? What's unexpected?
  • What was difficult about this task? What was fun?
  • What patterns do you see? What do they mean for you as a team?
  • Suggestions on how to continue?
►
◄
Decide what to do

Maximize Follow Through (#117)

Think about how the team will follow up and set yourselves up for success
Source: Chris Rimmer
Prepare a flip chart with 4 columns titled 'Action', 'Motivation', 'Ease' and 'Reminder'. Write down the list of actions the team wants to take in the first column. Read out each action and fill in the other columns by asking:
  • Motivation - How can we motivate ourselves to do this?
    Examples: 'Jane will own this and report back at the next retrospective', or 'We'll reward ourselves with cake on Friday if we do this every day'

  • Ease - How can we make it easy to do?
    Example: For an action 'Start involving Simon in the stand up' a possibility could be 'Move the task board next to Simon's desk'

  • Reminder - How will we remember to do this?
    Examples: 'Richard will put a reminder in Google Calendar' or 'We'll do this after the stand up each day'
Actions do not require all of the above. But if there are no suggestions for any of the columns, ask the team if they really think they will do it.
►
◄
Close the retrospective

Appreciations (#15)

Let team members appreciate each other and end positively
Source: Agile Retrospectives who took it from 'The Satir Model: Family Therapy and Beyond'
Start by giving a sincere appreciation of one of the participants. It can be anything they contributed: help to the team or you, a solved problem, ...Then invite others and wait for someone to work up the nerve. Close, when no one has talked for a minute.
►
◄

(#)


Source:
►
Retromat contains activities, allowing for combinations () 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 trainings for scrum master certification and product owner certification. He also 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. Connect with him on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon, FB, Insta, Threads.