Retrospective Techniques: Sailboat

One of my development goals for the next six months is to try out a variety of retrospective games with my team. I floated this idea a few sprints back and made sure that they were all okay with it, but the three members who made it to today's retrospective still seemed taken aback. One mentioned that we've never really gotten the hang of the basic three questions version, while another countered that it was really just another way of getting the same information (the third was late, never added anything to the drawing, and joined the conversation in progress).

Now, I picked this technique for the first exercise in part because it was a day when I thought the whole team was going to be in the office -- that turned out to not be the case, one member was working from home, and we had a brief discussion about why I am not on the team's Exchange email group. My other reason for starting with sailboat is that it's a pretty non-threatening exercise. I offered to abort the experiment, but they decided that we could go ahead with it.

I can't say participation was enthusiastic, but we surfaced a few issues and discussed them productively. In the final fifteen minutes, I asked them to pick a couple of items to work on for the next sprint. That ended up in a discussion of mob programming that sometimes seemed to be at cross-purposes, but the commitment was made to give it a try in the next sprint, along with addressing a technical problem that has caused some trouble. This team tends to default to working in the same pairs all the time, and I'm curious to see how the experiment goes for them.

The only opinion offered on the sailboat itself was that it was "cute." I guess we'll see what happens over the course of the sprint.

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