Successful Agile Retrospective using Mute Mapping

I have been meaning to blog about the success and failures that we are having at Integrum doing Agile Development. First let me say that anything you ever find in this blog related to agile probably did not come directly from me. It came from those that have gone before us and have been gracious enough to share. It is my hope that in sharing our experiences that others can build better teams from seeing our failure and our success.

Earlier this week I did part one of a story writing workshop that I will talk more about later (after I finish the series). It seemed to go fairly well and pretty much 98% of all the content came from the teachings, writings and discussions had with probably the greatest user story writer of our time, Mike Cohn. If you do not own User Stories Applied go buy it right now.

So this morning while waiting to see the surgeon, I was reading my news feeds and read James Shores blog article about Retrospectives. While I had seen this while reading his book The Art of Agile Development it was the incredible poster that made me attracted to this post.

We have been alternating every week who runs our retrospective and it has been a long time since I did one. I knew this was the thing I needed to encourage me to push us into a deeper retrospective, so I volunteered to run this weeks retrospective. I won’t recap the details of what was done, read the article and buy the book for the details.

I did capture a brief glimpse of mute mapping by the team on video and am including below.

When we were done mute mapping it was clear that communication/respect was the winner on what needed to be the focus of the objective. The team came up with a list of guidelines/points that are important for communication/respect. We have made a giant poster with this list of items to help keep us in check.

Here is the list:

Integrum Guide to Communication and Respect

• Actively LISTEN to each other
• Planning happens with ALL members of the team
• Deal directly with people to solve problems
• Be aware of WHAT you say and HOW you say it
• Rally wagons at first sign of problems
• Communicate Roles
• Communicate EARLY and OFTEN
• Be RESPONSIBLE for what is expected (demos, standups, timekeeping, planning, etc)
• Acknowledge and understand different points of view
• Stay on point during discussions
• Make time to communicate

The best part is that we had a discussion on our interviewing process immediately following the retrospective and we already saw a huge improvement in communication during that quick meeting. Some personal take aways I have are.

• Making the retrospective a game helps people get involved.
• Uncomfortable silence can help surface problems.
• Brainstorming with out expectations of what will be done with the data lends to more transparent sharing.
• Mute mapping can be fun and is highly effective to quickly organizing data.
• Stating the prime directive* and grouping things by what was done instead of who did what reduces the feeling of being attacked.
• Good healthy conversation lets you tackle/resolve problems in a very calming way.

If you are an agile shop, share your experiences with retrospectives!

This is a community call out. We need to more actively share our stories.

*There is a good discussion on the prime directive on InfoQ