The Retrospective Starfish
Diagrams are always useful focal points for starting discussions, and that’s one reason I like using the starfish diagram for a retrospective. This particular retrospective technique helps people by getting them to reflect on varying degrees of things that they want to bring up, without having it fit into the black or white category of ‘What Went Well’ or ‘Not So Well’ so I think it scales a little bit better.
A little bit about each category:
- Keep Doing – Is a good starting point for team members to focus on typically all the good things that they liked about a project. You might want to encourage people to think about things in terms of, what would they miss if they didn’t have a particular practice, technique, technology, person, role, etc. A good example from a real session I’ve been in before is ‘Running performance benchmarking and tuning during an iteration helps to identify regressions or slowdowns so we can address them earlier’.
- Less Of – Helps to focus on practices that might need a bit more refining or that were simply not helpful in the current circumstance. Perhaps they add value but not as much as other practices could. An example here is that perhaps stand ups have become status meetings and so there should less of talking to one person (and more of talking to each other) during them.
- More Of – Is another type of focus that helps further refine or highlight practices, technologies, etc that team members might want to try more and are not necessarily taking full advantage of. A good example is that maybe people are pair programming but knowledge transfer and a better understanding of the code changing might be gained by doing more of swapping programming partners.
- Stop Doing – Obviously for things that are not very helpful to development practices or not adding much value. Perhaps it’s about writing that status reporting email at the end of the day (because you can substitute a simple one minute conversation for it instead)
- Start Doing – Is a great opportunity for team members to suggest new things to try because of things that may not have gone so well or just for simply keeping things dynamic and fun. Perhaps you might want to try a burn up chart on the whiteboard or try some new open source tool for helping improve developer productivity.
Interpreting the Starfish
Getting people to either write things up under the starfish in this manner gives you a scattergram of sorts and is a great visual technique of estimating the overall health of your project. Most of the points on the starfish also try to coerce people into actually creating action items instead of simply saying that something was not good.
Comments(14)
[...] The Retrospective Starfish (tags: review craftmanship lifehacks) [...]
[...] The Retrospective Starfish: Interesting approach to doing a Lessons Learned Keywords: Project_Management/Tools [...]
[...] What really can help a team to have more effective retrospectives is the starfish, where the team writes down (or puts stickers) on what Keep Doing , Less Of, More Of, Stop Doing or Start Doing. [...]
[...] one for actions done, we just added a third column, the keep doing actions, it’s like having a star fish always [...]
Cheers for this Pat, I’ll be running one of these today.
[...] thekua.com@rest » The Retrospective Starfish (tags: Agile Retrospective Development Livehacks Review Brain ToDo More Less Continue Stop Start Doing) [...]
Cool idea. I will be trying this tomorrow with my team in an attempt to get them out of the retro rut they are in. Retros are lots of complaining and absolutely no action.
[...] that either involve the group without discussion (Starfish, Timeline) or that enforce a structure that gives everyone equal time and attention (Circle of [...]
[...] that force a democratic process, like the Circle of Questions or Starfish, are best for dealing with an Orator in the [...]
[...] Starfish – I really wanted to do a timeline, but given the time limitations, opted for the Starfish [...]
[...] Starfish on thekua.com [...]
Sprint 04 Retrospective…
Sprint 04 Retrospective This retrospective introduced the starfish technique…
Thank you very much for this great exercise. I have used it twice with wonderful success. The first time was with an Agile-Lean team, and the second was with a community. It is so useful to focus everyone on each of the five areas. Thanks again!
You’re very welcome Paul. Thanks for giving this a go and great to hear it work for you.