Facing Agile Retrospectives
The scrum teams use the retrospective to watch their steps, think about what they have done and search more improvements. Good things, bad things and mistakes. All must be clear and easy to understand. Do you think it's easy? Maybe if you work effectively with your team or better, if you are working in a team for a long time. But in a complex world like the software development, nothing must be taken for granted. To help the team to do this job there are some "puzzle games" to play. Let's see how they work.
Glad / Sad / Mad
Take 3 columns and write one post per column about what it was OK during the sprint and put it under the column Glad. Same job for the column Sad. Here you will put the notes about what made you sad and you want to avoid next time or you want to underline and let it know to all the team. On the column Mad, you will put the notes about what made you angry. The notes under sad and mad will be examined and the team will take actions to avoid these problems. The team will choose maximum of 3 main problems and they will take actions to solve them. The team will do actions during the next sprint and then examine the result. The only way to learn and improve this game is practice. Glad \ Sad \ Mad is useful when the scrum master decides to use this practice.
Starfish
IMG
Fishbone
See Ishikawa's diagram on Wikipedia. With the fishbone diagram you can search, check and about the 5Ws: why, where, when, who, what about a specific problem. If a member team put a note on a "W", at the end of this practice you'll have a gather of observations about the problem itself. IMG
Member on focus
This can too strong. Every team member must vote how the other team member was on focus on the sprint goal. If a team member give you a bad mark and your media voting is low, this mean they want you to work more on the main sprint focus and \ or help the other members to join the aim. I suffered a low media voting but I was strong enough to gain the trust of the other team members on all the sprint goal in many previous sprint and now I feel really improved! Blaming is very bad, learn to be on focus as much as possible is good!