Retrospective Smells

Hi guys, last post I wrote about pre requisites for a good retrospective. In this post I will write about the opposite: “Retrospective Smells”, this means that I will mention several things that you should play attention if it happens to you. These are signs that your retrospectives are not being effective. I want to highlight the fact that I did not create this list myself this will be a copy of the book Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley but I still think it is worth to share this with all of you.

Ideas fest
The team members are asked to call out ideas without discussing what happened in the last iteration. This does not work because problems are glassed over. Actions may not be connected to resolving problems and tend to be about trying out cool stuff rather than fixing what is not working.

History lessons
This retrospective is rather like an archeological dig that results only in lists of “what went well” and “what needs improvement” but no actions. This can improve communication as the team gradually understands what’s happening. But because there is no discussion about how to improve, change is left to individuals rather than planned into the next iteration.

Change the world
The team commits to an ambitious list of actions without considering wether it has time to get them done in the next iteration. This leads to disappointment because the actions do not get done and the team adds more actions to the list every retrospective.

Wishful thinking
Actions discussed are rather vague with no owners such as “improve communication” or “do more refactoring”. These are not actions; they are problems to work on. without more discussion, the team does not really know what to do to implement these pseudo actions.

No time to improve
The team takes five to ten minutes after their iteration demo to have a quick chat about how things have been going and calls that a retrospective. This is a sign that the team sees no benefit in retrospectives. If individuals do have ideas for improvement, they they face a struggle to implement them without a forum to get support from the team.

Hot air
The team spends the retrospective grumbling about how bad things are without taking responsibility for improve the situation. This may be cathartic and release tension in the team but can easily turn into a blame game. Retrospectives are about making changes for the better, and than cannot happen without some discussion of what the team can do.

These were the topics that Rachel and Liz wrote. I really think they are useful for all of us and that’s why I wrote them here in this blog post.

Hope you think they are useful.

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