Planning and Facilitating Release Retrospectives
There is a lot of emphasis, in literature and practice, on holding and leading sprint or iteration retrospectives. There is less information, guidance and advice about retrospectives with larger scope- release and project retrospectives that span multiple iterations and/or teams. Using journal information recorded from the planning and the conducting of a release retrospective with a scrum team, we’ll explore questions on who attended, when was a good time, what the goals, activities and results were, how it was planned and facilitated, and what the team and the facilitator learned.
This report will be as conversational as possible. As in other talks I’ve done at other venues, I’ll use some polling by raised hands to gauge where the group is- have they or their teams had release retrospectives? Project retrospectives? Were they the facilitator or a participant?
The basic flow will be (but will be flexible based on the data gathered above): Introduction/Motivation for Release Retrospectives 5 min Planning the retrospective 10 min Holding the retrospective 5 min Feedback and lessons from the retrospective 7 min