Agile Archive

Today I had another simple and fun retro, this time I themed it using the classic Donkey Kong/Mario.

Here are the steps in which I facilitated it:

• I invited everyone to open the whiteboard. While everybody was doing so, a nice discussion started about the game itself (old donkey kong) and what everybody’s first gaming experience was (gameboy, amiga, sega, nes, etc). So I gave it a couple of minutes to set the mood.
• people started playing on the board by moving mario and the flames/barrels 😂 (tip, make sure to lock the level-background, via right click)
• I invited everyone to take about 10 minutes to come up with items for all of the questions and stick them on the board
• To signal the timebox was almost over, I started this tune in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cttPiwzcKnc
• together we walked the board, whenever we identified improvements I already summarized them on stickies and moved those to the last section.
• during the “What obstacles did we overcome?” section, I added an additional question “what did we learn from this”, this helped us identify some additional improvements we could make
• I closed the session by asking anyone to recommend a game which we could play as a team together next week, and ended up scheduling a lunch session to play Among Us together

I stole the idea from here 😇: https://medium.com/@dougidle/the-donkey-kong-sprint-retrospective-983b4ae3bb42

Did a nice session last week by creating a Whiteboard in which we create the following columns:

• Quality Aspects
• Shortlisted Quality Aspects(Only 6)
• List down the risk associated with each quality aspect
• Impact x Likelihood
• Risk Response (Mitigation Strategy)

Stole the idea from here: https://www.ministryoftesting.com/testsphere/riskstorming

Open Spaces give attendees the opportunity to talk about anything they’d like. A person might suggest a topic they want to learn about, or one they feel like they can help others with. The topics range widely, from highly technical, to pure culture, to board games for networking. Open space is the simplest meeting format that could possibly work .It is based on (un)common sense of what people do naturally in productive meetings.

Principles (from Wikipedia on Open_Space_Technology):

While the mechanics of Open Space provide a simple means to self-organize, it is the underlying principles that make it effective both for meetings and as a guidepost for individual and collective effectiveness.

The Law of mobility — a foot of passion and a foot of responsibility — expresses the core idea of taking responsibility for what you love. In practical terms, the law says that if you’re neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet (or available form of mobility) and go somewhere where you can. It is also a reminder to stand up for your passion.

From the law flow four principles:

• Whoever comes is the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it’s over, it’s over

The open space rallying cry is:

Open Space Mechanics

Since the meeting is supposed to be self-organizing, the conveners put their energy not in running the meeting but creating a setting that gets everyone’s creative energy flowing.

Opening:

1. Show the timeline, how the event breaks down into Opening, Marketplace of ideas, Break-out sessions, Closing.
2. Sponsor introduces the theme. Briefly. One or two minutes max. Long openings drain the energy of the meeting quickly. Get participants to work ASAP.
3. Facilitators introduce the principles and the format. Explain how the marketplace of ideas works.

Dan Maher has a slidedeck to help explain how the open spaces work.

Marketplace of ideas:

1. Participants write ‘issues’ on pieces of paper. Preferably with bold markers, so they are easy to read from a distance.
2. Participants choose a timeslot for their topic on the agenda wall.
3. One by one, participants explain their issue to the others, with the aim of drawing the right people to their break-out-session.

Break-out sessions: Once people do not come up with new issues (wait a little bit, and ask ‘are we done?’. I find the silence that often happens at the beginning and end of the marketplace the scariest. However, this silence seems to be very productive.

You may ask people to put their name on sessions they want to attend. More than one session per slot is OK… (law of mobility  ). This gives conveners an idea of how busy their session is going to be. It gives participants an image of how the break-out session is going.

People may shuffle sessions around, or merge sessions as they are deciding where to go. Have a wiki where people can record outcomes of sessions, or provide paper forms for note-taking during sessions (recording who attended, a summary of the session and outcomes/questions for further work) that you can collect into a ‘book of proceedings’.

The facilitators’ role in this bit of the conference is to answer questions, and make sure everyone has the materials they need to run their break-out session. They do not (in principle) intervene in the sessions – the participants are supposed to self-organize.

Closing: Have everyone back in the circle. A simple and effective way to close is to have the participants pass a ‘talking stick’ around, and let them (briefly, e.g. in a sentence or a word) say what they feel about the day.

Bumblebees and butterflies: Bumblebees internalize the law of mobility quickly, and constantly flit from meeting to meeting, pollinating, cross-fertilizing, and adding richness and variety.

Butterflies may never get into any meeting. They are focal points of quiet and beauty. If you watch them, every once in a while you’ll see them engage in conversation. Those conversations often are significant.

^{(copied from https://devopsdays.org/open-space-format/)}