Ranting About Retrospectives

Following on from Thinking About Code, I have since participated in a retrospective and the introspective process has inspired me to rant :)

Free Your Mind

One of the problems we had in our last retrospective was we were very much unprepared. Many of us did not have proper notes and worst of all there was a negative mindset toward the whole retrospective process. This time around everyone actively prepared and everyone was onboard with the idea of using the retrospective to improve the way we work. A positive viewpoint really works wonders and resulted in a much higher quality of the discussion :)

Bricks Without Clay

As the famous Sherlock quote goes, you can only put theories together when you have data. This principle holds true for any scientific process, including retrospectives. This is computer science we are dealing with after all!

In our case, data is as simple as our likes and dislikes about our work. However as there is a month between our retrospectives, forgetfulness is a major issue. Ongoing observation is the key here, we all need to constantly seek out analyse the way we work. This can be as simple as jotting down notes on what you feel is good/bad as you work. 

Get To The Point

Open ended questions like "what did you like/dislike this month?" are great for getting people to open up but can lead to rambling. In an ideal world you want everyone to distill their feelings beforehand and provide short and sweet summaries. The key is to move beyond raw emotions and use unambiguous statements: "I don't like rambling" is better stated as: "I like people being concise".

Mixing It Up

When undergoing the process of self reflection, it is important to have compare and contrast against others. Trying to view things from an outsider's perspective can throw into light problems/opportunities you would have otherwise missed. In our case, reviewing a piece of code written by an applicant threw up a lot of interesting viewpoints.

Conclusion

Overall I feel that retrospectives are having a positive effect on the team and the change in mentality is very refreshing. We are all looking at ways to better ourselves, both individually and as a team. The next steps are to achieve the things we have talked about, which is always easier said than done.

Thinking About Code

Last night I dragged my colleague Simon to the monthly LSCC Round Table and we had some interesting conversations around the topic: "how to balance time between discussing code and actually coding". The session was enlightening and we ended the night with a lot of food for thought (to supplement all the pizza and soft drinks provided by our wonderful hosts xD).

The original premise for the discussion came from a feeling within our team that we were doing retrospectives too often. Assuming that nothing "bad" has happened lately, was it necessary to hold a retrospective? Would forcing a retrospective simply push people to artificially discuss arbitrary topics for the simple sake of it?

We need more data to make a proper judgement but it is clear that there is more we can do to benefit from our retrospectives. One of the obstacles in our way could be a misperceived purpose of a retrospective: a process through which to fix problems. Whilst this is an aspect of retrospectives, if we look at how others do retrospectives it quickly become apparent that the focus is primarily on gathering feedback. Even when things are going well, there is bound to be something that could be improved, nobody is perfect after all!

Contrary to this, changing simply for the sake of change can be a waste of time. Identifying the right areas/processes to change is hard. In our case it very much feels like we need to prepare better for our retrospectives and do more to facilitate the discussions inside them. There is a wealth of material out there on retrospective facilitation but Tom's blog post on the 7 pillars of agile and spiderweb retrospective caught my eye.

As mentioned, it is very early days for our team as we only had two retrospectives since we changed the format and it would be premature to apply any changes as a knee jerk reaction. Going back to the very core of the issue, we have to ensure everyone understands the purpose of the retrospective. Once everyone has the same mindset, we can start evolving the process from there :)

Credit to http://sebastianlab.com/post/140303165/typing-is-not-the-bottleneck from which I got the typing monkey image :)