Retrospective for a distributed team.

I have been conducting retrospectives for quite some time now have been always looking at exploring ways to get better at them. In this blog I would like share my experience of conducting a retrospective with a scrum team which was geographically distributed. This is my way of conducting retrospectives which has brought me some success and not necessarily the right way. Please feel free to comment and suggest areas of improvements.

My retrospectives are heavily influenced by Esther Derby & Dian Larsen's book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and have always followed the suggested five stage process of conducting retrospectives.

- Setting the stage.
- Date gathering.
- Decide what to do.
- Close retrospective.
- Retrospect the retrospective.

I am a strong believer in the above steps of retrospective and have experienced the importance of the steps crucial for reaping all the benefits of a retrospective.

With a team distributed geographical it is best to hold the retrospective over a video conference. If that is not a option then the alternative which can be easily put to use is have a set of high quality web cams setup at both the locations over skype or other social video chat facilities easily available. I use the video chat software's for visuals only and rely on phones for voice to keep away bandwidth related problems.

Setting the stage
One of the very obvious fears people have about retrospectives is that the ritual will become a negative blame game session. If it does then then it will not contribute to any learning. The key to a constructive retrospective is assuring that all the participants adhere to the retrospective prime directive:

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."

A slide shared across sites using the prime directive seemed sufficient.

Data Gathering

- What went well ?
- What did not go well ?
- What can we improve ?

The above three questions form the crux of a retrospective. Each questions is put forth and the team then discusses, agrees and lists the events in relation to the above questions. I have used a shared excel workbook to capture the events across locations.

Apart from this I also like to capture the sprint mood:

If this sprint was human what would it feel ?
- Happy :-)
- Disappointed :-|
- Sad :-(

I use outlook voting button to capture the sprint mood just before the retrospective starts.

Decide what to do

Having captured events and ensured everyone in the team has had a chance to speak is an achievement in it self. With limited time available the next challenge is to choose items for improvement in the next sprint. I always suggest the team to 1-2 or a maximum of three items for improvement in the next sprint to avoid an overload.

How do we decide in a distributed team ?
Well voting with dots is the best way to do it in a collocated team. I case of a distributed team I would capture the votes on a excel sheet. You can allocate 5 votes for each team member, they could then use the votes as they like on the events listed. Team members have the options to place one or more votes for an event. Once every one has had the chance to vote you can then easily identify the items which need immediate attention and seek volunteer pairs to take actions on the improvement areas. I am suggesting a pair takes ownership to enable better collaboration within the team.

Close Retrospective.
I like to close retrospective with a thank you note to the team and also give an opportunity to any one in the team including PO if present to speak.

Retrospect on the retrospective.
Continuous improvement is the essence of being Agile and retrospectives also need improvement, spending a few minutes to discuss how your retrospectives can further improve will enable you to gather feedback and discuss ways to make your retrospectives better.