Introduction

This activity has been adjusted to meet the needs of the day. UNLESS specifically told by your instructor(!), the instructions below, associated with the team retrospective, will NOT BE CONDUCTED WITH THE USE OF A WHITEBOARD OR STICKIES. Instead, a Trello board template will be afforded to each team at the beginning of the session in which the restrospective is conducted.

Your team members must still come prepared having captured on their own the issues in preparation for the team activity. Anyone who is not in compliance may be required to leave the session. Clarify with your instructor the specific expectations on how to bring your individual contributions in advance of the class.

This team activity has seven steps:

1. Every member creates issue cards (in advance of the activity)
2. Members place each card on the starfish chart (see picture below)
3. A facilitator reads aloud each issue and groups common issues together
4. Every member votes for five issues on the chart
5. The facilitator picks the top three issues by number of votes
6. The team brainstorms on solutions to each of these top issues
7. The team creates action items for the next sprint to address the top issues

During the activity you will document the process:

• A photo of your starfish chart after voting (step 4)
• A document of your action items for the top three issues (step 7)

These will be submitted to a Dropbox. More instructions at the end.

You will not have enough time to complete this activity during the class. We have provided guidance to the expected length of each step of the activity. You should try to get through at least the first five steps before the end of class and then finish the activity outside of class. The Dropbox submission will be due at the start of the next class session.

Step 1: Every member creates issue cards (e.g. from the list completed prior to activity)

Spend five minutes and think about your last sprint. List up to five issues you had in the sprint. Consider these questions:

1. What should I/we start doing?
2. What should I/we keep doing?
3. What should I/we stop doing?

Try to find one or two positive things that happened during the sprint; a "keep doing" item.

Write each issue, you previously worked on, as a separate Trello card (unless you have been instructed to do t his excercise on post-it notes). All of you should have already done this part of the the pre-class quiz. Still spend a minute or two in case you think of something new, and to give those didn't do the quiz time to come up with a several ideas. The issues should be roughly at this level of detail:

Coming up with ideas can be challenging on your own so here are topics to consider:

• Adding, removing or improving processes:
  • backlog refinement
  • sprint planning
  • calculating team capacity (velocity)
  • daily standups in-person and virtual
  • sprint review/demo
  • sprint retrospective (the meta process)
• Adding, removing or improving testing:
  • unit testing
  • unit testing code coverage
  • integration testing (esp for web apps)
  • acceptance (manual) testing
• Adding, removing or improving reviews:
  • code reviews
  • reviewer engagement
  • pre-planning design reviews
  • pre-development design reviews
• Adding or improving developer or team skills:
  • better use of Spikes
  • addition of tech talks
  • formal member training
• Adding or improving team communication:
  • better use of communication tools
  • more (or less?) face-to-face meetings
  • better virtual (distributed) teaming practices

This step could take up to five minutes depending upon how many members need to create issue cards.

Step 2: Members place each card on the starfish chart (e.g. Trello special board)

* If instructed to do this on whiteboard, select a facilitator who will draw the starfish shape and labels onto the room's whiteboard. It should fill the board and look like this:

Next, each team member places their issue cards onto the starfish chart in the proper location. (e.g. Corresponding column on Trello special board)

This step should take only a minute or two.

Step 3: A facilitator reads aloud each issue and groups common issues together

The facilitator reads each card aloud to the team. If clarification is needed, the author can answer questions but the facilitator has the floor so there should not be other extraneous discussion. As the facilitator reads the cards, he or she groups similar issues together by moving the similar cards next to each other.

This step should take ten to fifteen minutes.

Step 4: Every member votes for five issues on the chart

* If instructed to do this on whiteboard, usin whiteboard pens, every member votes for their five favorite issues (or issue group). Do not put votes on issues in the Keep doing category. ( On Trello the voting mechanism is done via de menu when openning a card as in:

After all are done the votes look like this:

Here are examples of starfish chart with votes.

When the voting is done, take a snapshot of the whiteboard. You will submit this image file to the Sprint Retrospective Analysis dropbox in the Exercises area of myCourses.

This step should take only a few minutes.

Step 5: The facilitator picks the top three issues by number of votes

You will record the top three issues in a SEPARATE Word document. Here is the template file and here is a sample file. The facilitator should type in a summary of the issue in the left-most column. After this step, you are done with the whiteboard.

This step should take only a few minutes.

Step 6: The team brainstorms solutions to each of these top issues

Starting with the top issue, brainstorm ideas to address these top issues. Not all ideas that come out in the brainstorming need to become action items. The team may find consensus on the best ideas from the brainstorming.

This step should take could take up to 10 minutes for each issue.

Step 7: The team creates action items for the next sprint to address the top issues

Record the set of action items identified in the brainstorming session for each issue in the Word document.

This step should take only a few minutes.

Dropbox Submission

Rename the template file to Team X - Sprint Retrospective.docx, where X is the capital letter for your team. Submit their action plan to the Sprint retrospective action plan - team in Team Exercises area of myCourses before the time specified in your section's schedule.