There are all sorts of different retrospective techniques out there, but I like to keep the sessions quite fun and interactive. I recently attended a few training sessions which contained a good amount of video usage, blended with discussion. This got me thinking of a different way of doing retrospectives.
For this technique to work, it’s ideal for team members to have laptops and earphones. If not, then you can give the team some prep time beforehand (you’ll see why below). Your meeting room or area where you choose to hold the session will need to have decent A/V equipment to allow you to play YouTube videos to everyone else.
The technique goes like so:
- Give the team about 5 minutes to find a YouTube video that best describes how they felt during the sprint
- Rules for finding a clip are:
- Non-offensive
- Must be 1 minute long (the total length of the video can be longer, but only 1 minute can be played)
- After the 5 minutes, each clip is played to the rest of the team
- After each clip, the rest of the team discussed to try find out what that person was feeling during the sprint by their video clip choice
- After they find out (give them a few minutes to discuss), a discussion around that point will entail, focussing primarily on improvement points to take out
- You, as the Scrum Master / Agile Coach, can document these points (in typical ‘what’s gone well, what hasn’t gone well, what can we improve’ fashion)
- At the end of the session, summarise up by grouping similar points, and focus on the key points of improvements to tackle for the next sprint
The overall structure is quite a normal retrospective, however I think adding the YouTube aspect certainly gives it a different emotional twist. The majority of retrospective techniques focus on factual statements, e.g. “builds were slow”. This technique focuses more on the emotional side and really gets the team thinking as to how other people feel. This is great in larger teams where it’s not always easy to know what’s going on with other people.
I’d be interested to hear how other teams find this technique, so please do give it a try and leave a comment as to how it went for you!