In this post, I will explain the exercise called “StarFish”. This exercise can be found in the book: “Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives”, a book written by me and Ben Linders with the foreword from Esther Derby. The book can be downloaded by free in LeanPub.com or InfoQ.com, please download it and spread it within your colleagues.

Here you can find my previous blog “Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: “Happiness Index””.

What can you expect to get out of this technique
Starfish exercise is an evolution of the typical three questions that are used for retrospectives:

• What went well
• What did not go so well
• What will be improved

Instead of the typical three questions we have a circle with five words:

• Stop - These are the activities that do not bring value to a team or to a customer. Activities that bring waste into the process.
• Less - These are activities where an effort required to perform such activities is much smaller than a benefit. Or the activities that were brought into the team in past but did not show any overall improvements to a process.
• Keep - Usually these are good activities or practices that team members want to keep. These activities are already being applied.
• More - Activities on which a team should focus better, perform more often. For example, many teams tell me how pair programming is good,yet they do not do it every time they should.
• Start - Activities or ideas that a team wants to bring into the game.

With this exercise, teams can get a good overall picture of what’s going on within the team, what is working and what is not. They can get an overview about failed as well as successful work experiences in past. In my personal opinion, I think this is a great evolution of the typical three questions.

When you would use this technique
I believe this technique is quite simple and does not require any special occasion. Although, it might be interesting for situations when a team went through several ups and downs during the iteration. This technique reveals all good things and less positive things performed by a team. Therefore, this might be a good tool to make a summary of the sprint.

StarFish is suitable for any team, it does not require any specific level of maturity.

How to do it
This retrospective is quite simple. First we draw something like what is shown on the picture in a flip chart. One of the beauties of this exercise is the fact that collocation of a team is not mandatory. You can use, for example, tools like Lino to apply the exercise on non-collocated teams. This tool allows us to do everything what we need in order to run this exercise.

After having the picture on a flip chart, it´s good to start a brain storming session with a team allowing them to dump their ideas in the “Stop” area. After that, give 2-3 minutes to each person to read out loud its “stop” ideas. Afterwards, spend 10 minutes for a short discussion to see if everyone is aligned.

Repeat the exercise for each different parts: “Less”, “Keep” and “More”.

For the “Start” part, add one extra step and use Toyota approach choosing one single topic to “Start”. I would go for votes and see what is the most important topic that one should start with. After selecting the topic, design a small strategy to make sure a topic is well implemented. This strategy might include responsible persons, due date and most important success criteria. In order to know if the implementation was successful or not, we must have a success criteria.

I would like to highlight that a theme that is chosen in the “Start” part, does not need to be a new topic for a team, it can be an improvement of something that is not working well within the team.
Another important thing that I think it´s worth to mention, is the order of different “words” in the circle. I really like to start with: “Stop”, “Less”, “Keep”, “More” and finish with “Start”. I think this has a big impact. Starting with negatives topics and progressing little by little towards the positive ones will help the team to end the retrospective with a much more positive feeling than if they did it in a random order.

I honestly think this exercise is really nice, but I really would love to get your feedback. Please comment on this and let me know your opinion.

On my next blog post I explain how to use the “Value Stream Mapping” exercise to run a retrospective.

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Thanks guys,
Luis

In this post, I will explain the exercise “Happiness Index”. This exercise can be found in the book: “Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives”, a book written by me and Ben Linders with the foreword from Esther Derby. The book can be downloaded by free in LeanPub.com or InfoQ.com, please download it and spread it within your colleagues.

This exercise is a combination of “Develop a time line” and “Emotions Seismograph” from Norman L. Kerth.

What can you expect to get out of this technique
The purpose of this exercise is to draw a graphic representation of team members´ emotions during sprints, connecting their emotions to sprint events. With this kind of information, the team can identify what exactly affects its performance during the sprint. For example, if they have some problems with the build server, most probably the mood will drop because of the team frustration not being able to proceed with the work. This kind of exercise is a great way to represent team emotions within the sprint.

When you would use this technique
I believe this technique is quite simple and does not require any special occasion. Although, it might be suitable for situations when a team has many different emotions within the sprint and they wish to analyse the consequences, or when the team has several challenges within the sprint and would like to understand better when and how the issues appeared.

Happiness Index is suitable for any team, it does not require any specific level of maturity.

How to do it
To perform this exercise, you simply need a A4 white sheet and some post-it notes. Start by dividing the sheet in two parts, having positive and negative axis. After, divide the X axis in the number of days that your sprint has.

There are two ways of doing this exercise:

1) The exercise is done within the retrospective itself with all the team
2) The exercise is done in small pieces during the sprint

Let´s start with the first option, create small groups of 2 or 3 persons. Ask them to do a small brainstorming session and let them think about all the events that occurred during the sprint. Afterwards, ask them to create a graphic showing emotion levels with events occurred during the sprint. When all groups are done, create a representation of all small groups in a single graphic. Do not forget to put an explanation of each different emotion.

For the second option, instead of the team drawing the graphic in the retrospective, each person will draw his own emotion level at the end of each work day. This approach will make sure that all events are covered and not forgotten.

Using one way or another, we will have a fantastic picture of what happened during the sprint. With this kind of information, a facilitator can help the team to identify events that should be repeated and events that cause delay in the team. The root of problems can be found using normal root cause analyses techniques.

With the right imagination, this exercise can be applied to remote teams as well. Being collocated is not a requirement to run this exercise.

What do you think about this exercise? Do you think this would be a good retrospective exercise for our new book? To find more information about the book, check my post here.

On my next blog post I explain how to use the “Star Fish” exercise to run a retrospective.

Please leave your comments, all your comments and ideas will help me to improve the exercise and the book.

Did you like this post? Do you want to get more in the future? Subscribe my newsletter below and follow me on twitter: @lgoncalves1979.

I am trying to improve these blog posts with a help from professional designers and editors to give you even more valuable content. If you want to support me on this effort, feel free to contribute with any amount of money that you think it´s fair.

Thanks guys,
Luis

Hi guys, I want to use this post to introduce a topic I will discuss during next few weeks. Me and my colleague Ben Linders we are writing a pocket book about retrospectives. The title of this book is: “Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives“.

The main target are: Agile coaches, scrum masters, project or product managers or facilitators who have at least some experience with doing retrospectives. They know the purpose of them, how they fit into agile / scrum, and how to arrange and perform them. This book will deliver practical description of retrospectives and how to do them, as well as an inspiration to different retrospective techniques and good practices in doing them.

Based on the previous information I want to use this blog to get a feedback from you. During following weeks I will publish several posts that will cover retrospective exercises and I would like to get some comments which would enable me to improve a content for the final version.

Below you can find some of the exercises that will be part of the book(Ben’s exercises are not here).

• Happiness Index
• Star Fish
• Value Stream Mapping
• Team Assessment Survey
• Brand Car
• Constellation
• High Performance Tree from Lyssa Adkins
• Boat
• Awesomeness Definition
• Amazon Review

In conclusion, I would like to ask you to leave as much feedback as possible so that I can improve the outcome of this book.

Did you like this post? Do you want to get more in the future? Subscribe my newsletter below and follow me on twitter: @lgoncalves1979.

I am trying to improve these blog posts with a help from professional designers and editors to give you even more valuable content. If you want to support me on this effort, feel free to contribute with any amount of money that you think it´s fair.

Thanks guys,
Luis

Hi guys, in this post I want to demonstrate a small exercise that I learned from the book “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making” by Sam Kaner.

As an agile coach I spend lot of time introducing new ideas to teams but a question is: ” How can I figure out if these ideas will have enough buy-in from teams to be implemented?” The exercise that I´m showing you today will solve this problem; the exercise is called “Gradient of Agreement”.

The exercise is really easy. Use a flip-chart, draw fiver different levels of agreement: “Endorse”, “Agree with reservations”, “Mixed feelings”, “Disagree but go with the majority” and “Block”. Ask team members to put a check mark on the level they feel comfortable, as presented below in the example.

Using this kind of tool allows everyone to reveal its own opinion and level of commitment to the proposed approach. Sometimes it is not possible to get buy-in from the team, therefore I propose that you start with small steps, instead of having an ambitious final solution. Why not break the solution in small pieces, for example, instead of proposing to the team that automated tests should run after every check in, split this ambitious goal into smaller ones:

• Automated tests should run automatically after every checkin
• Automated tests should run manually after every checkin
• Automated tests should run automatically every night
• Automated tests should run manually every night

And use the same technique for each different goal. After that chose the one that has the right balance between an ambition and agreement from the team.

This was the exercise that I wanted to bring up today.