What I learnt from a test retrospective

“You learn something every day if you pay attention.” ~Ray LeBlond

Infrequent retrospectives can be very time consuming and inefficient to both the team and the facilitator. For the past couple of years, test retrospectives within my team are carried out after every major release, which is generally once or twice a year. Due to the frequency at which the retrospectives were carried out, I had found that all the participants came up with lots of problems to discuss, most of which were not really focussed on team’s continuous improvement. There was a tendency for the retrospectives to become complaint sessions.

Recently, an opportunity to experiment with the way we conducted retrospectives knocked my door. My test manager asked me to facilitate the test retrospective for the previous release and gave me the liberty to conduct it in a way I wanted to.

As a keen experimenter, I wanted to try a new approach we hadn’t used before with the team. My goals were to make the retrospective

• efficient in terms of time
• provoke the team members to provide ideas that could be turned into actionable commitments
• a fun activity

Preparation

On one of the days after the daily standup, I presented some slides which were aimed at answering retrospective questions – why, how, what, where and when

New team members were introduced about the reason for having our team retrospectives.

An adaptation of star fish and DAKI methods was planned for the retrospective.

Keep doing

• Is a good starting point to focus on typically all the good things that we liked in previous release.
• Participants need to think about things in terms of, what would they miss if they didn’t have a particular practice, technique, technology, person, role, etc.

Less of/Stop

• Something being done; we see some value, but we rather reduce; either  a little bit or all of it

More of

• Is another type of focus that helps further refine or highlight practices, technologies, etc that team members might want to try more and are not necessarily taking full advantage of.

Start doing

• Is a great opportunity for team members to suggest new things to try because of things that may not have gone so well or just for simply keeping things dynamic and fun. 

The above method was chosen after a lot of thought. Below are the 3 main reasons for choosing it.

The retrospective was scheduled to be carried out as 2 meetings:

1. brainstorming
2. selection of ideas to take further action

The participants were requested to send their ideas beforehand which were written down in post-its to be brought into the brainstorming meeting. Ideas raised were to be discussed during the brainstorming meeting followed by dot voting to select the top ideas to act on.

As a facilitator, I would summarize the highly voted ideas to be discussed further to be converted to actionable commitments by understanding the possible challenges that can be faced.

On the day of brainstorming

Due to bad quality of post-its, I had to transfer the content of post-its to a spreadsheet prior to the meeting as an emergency fix. The spreadsheet was used to talk about our ideas. Post-its were still used for the dot voting system.

After brainstorming and voting, highly voted ideas were summarized and shared with the participants.

Converting ideas into actionable commitment

The participants gathered together in a couple of days to discuss how to convert the highly voted ideas into actionable commitments. Though the team had a shared responsibility to make sure we worked towards making the actions a reality, I introduced the concept of having an owner for each action. If there is more than one way to carry out an action and the action can be carried out as per one of the discussed ideas, the owner has to nudge the team to apply the action.

What I learnt – a retrospective of the retrospective method

What went well?

• Dividing up the meetings was efficient and gave time to think about the ideas to be discussed.
• The motivation behind using the method used was successfully met.

What didn’t go well?

• Post its were not manageable and I ended up using Excel spreadsheet for discussing the ideas.
  • I use Trello for my personal kanban and had thought of using it for the retrospective. But the idea was put aside since
    • all the participants had to create a new login and be introduced to the tool
    • there is always a question of security about the free tool
• There were participants who still provided thoughts which didn’t fit very well in the 4 categories of the method used. This had to be dealt with outside of the retrospective.

What did I learn?

• Requesting the participants to send in ideas couples of days in advance of the brainstorming meeting would be useful. The ideas could be added directly to an online tool such as Redmine agile board.
• Voting could be done outside the meeting on an online kanban to save time.
• The possibility of using Redmine agile board is being explored at the moment.
• Use of templates for providing ideas in order to prevent complaints was suggested by my test manager. Adventures in retrospectives helping a large team focus by Lisa Crispin shows an example of using templates. This is something that I am keen to try in the next round of retrospective.

References and further reading

1. Star fish retrospective
2. DAKI retrospective
3. Adventures in retrospectives helping a large team focus by Lisa Crispin

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