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Monday, June 19, 2017

The Fast and the Furious (and other Fs) retrospective activity

Recently I lacked some inspiration for a good technique suitable for the upcoming retrospective. As the team was growing in their agile way of working, I decided to leave it to the team to come up with a nice activity. I was very surpised with the outcome. A brand new activity which we called the Fast and the Furious (and other Fs).

Goal

This activity’s goal is to gather information about the sprint.

Timing

The activity can be finished in about 30-60 minutes (depending on your teamsize).

Materials

This activity makes use of :

  • Sticky notes and pens
  • One piece of paper (flip-over, brown paper)
Instructions
Preparation

Draw 5 cells on the paper. This could be either a star, columns or rows.  Write in each of the cells the following Words: Fast, Furious, Fun(ny), First and Fed up.

Execution – basic

The agile coach request the team members for ideas in each of the next categories, and asks them to wirte these on sticky notes:

  • Fast: things that went very fast;
  • Furious: things that made you furious;
  • Fun(ny): things that were fun or funny;
  • First: things that you experienced the first time;
  • Fed up: things that you really annoyed you and want to get rid off.

The team members stick their notes in the corresponsing cells. And have a discussion on their notes.

Execution – extended

You might want to use different colours for

  • each category
  • to differentiate between subjects like process, tools, environment.

Sometimes you need categories as you might want to pinpoint a certain behaviour. In those cases be flexible. There are many English words starting with an F, like Flexibility, so you can find a more suiteable word for your retrospective.

Continuation

Once the information has been gathered and dicussed the team can define action items to improve themselves.

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