There is a team who has been working really hard to achieve a deadline, the deadline actually is next month, currently, they are in the last month and nerves and stress starts to pop up.
I was in their Stand Up this week where one of the developers basically said, why are working on this bug now? this made me think, he probably said that because he identified that bug as a something notimportant for now.
This week also we had a retrospective, actually, the morning before the retro, while I was driving to the office I was thinking… which kind of retro could I do today? what is important now? and it happened! an idea came to min mind.
I did not copy this model, all of a sudden came to my mind, but probably is not the first time that someone does it! so, what it is?
This retro has been prepared specifically for this occasion, most of the retros I have seen focus on things we could improve in the next iteration, but in this case, we have animportant factor, there is a deadline coming, we are developing a product and in one month we need to deliver the MVP.
Valuable Topics Retrospective
The retrospective will focus on the topics we are currently working on, how valuable they are based on our perception.
As you can see we have 4 areas:
Topics we are working on that we must have
Each participant will write their on notes and we will basically expose to everyone the different perceptions of what are the different must-have that currently the team is working on, with this we will see if everyone is on the same page, if they share the same vision of what needs to achieve the MVP.
Topics we are working on that are not really a must
What we want to know here is if we are working on topics that are not really necessary for the MVP, remember what I said about the bug during the Stand Up, if the team has different specialities, like front-end, back-end, QA, operations, etc… we can easily find ourselves doing something that is not really needed, and even if the PO should be prioritising what adds more value now, we are humans and things can happen.
In this area again, we will be sharing our perception of what are the things we are doing now that we don’t really seeimportant for the release date.
Topics not started yet that we must have
This one is highly connected with the one before, basically we want to spot here topics we need to have for the MVP but we haven’t started, sometimes we leave certain stuff for the end, and that stuff can be forgotten, so having each participant sharing their thoughts will really create awareness of what we need that we haven’t done yet.
This one is powerful, because as I said before, the team could have different specialities, and that the beautiful thing, is our speciality and we probably know more than the others about what we really need to have, for example: a QA engineer could say, “Having the complete automation pipeline ready generating reports after every build”, and in order to achieve this we could need some back-end developers to help. This is just a random example, but you know what I mean.
Action points
I think this one is self-explanatory, make sure you can identify top 3 or 4 actions points that the team really can action them during the upcoming days.
