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Emoticon Project Gauge (#32)

Help team members express their feelings about a project and address root causes early
Source: Andrew Ciccarelli
Prepare a flipchart with faces expressing various emotions such as:
  • shocked / surprised
  • nervous / stressed
  • unempowered / constrained
  • confused
  • happy
  • mad
  • overwhelmed
Let each team member choose how they feel about the project. This is a fun and effective way to surface problems early. You can address them in the subsequent phases.

Hit the Headlines (#119)

Which sprint events were newsworthy?
Source: Thomas Guest
Collect some news headlines in advance and take them to the retrospective to serve as examples. Try to gather a mixture of headlines: factual, opinion, review. Place the headlines where everyone can see them. Hand out sticky notes. Give team members 10 minutes to come up with their own headlines describing newsworthy aspects of the sprint. Encourage short, punchy headlines.
Stick the completed headlines to a whiteboard. If any cover the same news item, combine them. If any are unclear, ask the reporter for details. Vote on which news items to discuss and analyse in more depth.

Set Course (#113)

Imagine you're on a voyage - Cliffs and treasures await
Source: Katrin Dreyer
Imagine you're navigating a boat instead of a product or service. Ask the crew the following questions:
  1. Where is a treasure to be found? (New things worth trying)
  2. Where is a cliff to be safe from? (What makes the team worry)
  3. Keep course for ... (What existing processes go well?)
  4. Change course for... (What existing processes go badly)

Planning Poker Voting (#99)

Use your Planning Poker cards for un-influenced voting
Source: Andreas Ratsch
If you've got very influential and / or shy team members you can re-use Planning Poker cards to vote simultaneously:

Write all suggested actions on sticky notes and put them onto a wall. Hand out an ordered deck of Planning Poker cards to each participant. Count the proposals and remove that many cards from the back of the card decks. If you've got 5 suggestions you might have cards '1', '2', '3', '5', and '8'. This depends on your deck (some have a '1/2' card). It doesn't matter, as long as all participants have the same set of values.

Explain the rules: Choose a card for each suggestion. Choose a low value if the action is not worth doing in your opinion. Choose a high value if the action is worth starting next iteration.

Give them a minute to sort out their internal ranking and then present the first suggested action. Everybody chooses a card and they reveal them at the same time. Add the numbers from all cards and write the sum onto the action. Remove the used poker cards. Repeat this for all actions. If you have more actions than poker values the players can show 'no card' (counting 0) for the appropriate number of times.

Implement the action with the highest sum in the next iteration. Add more actions only if there's team consensus to do so.

Feedback Door - Smilies (#23)

Gauge participants' satisfaction with the retro in minimum time using smilies
Source: Boeffi
Draw a ':)', ':|', and ':(' on a sheet of paper and tape it against the door. When ending the retrospective, ask your participants to mark their satisfaction with the session with an 'x' below the applicable smily.

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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.