August Retrospective

As part of “Agile Development”, you have a meeting called a Retrospective where you look back on things that have happened over a certain time period (like two weeks), and say what happened, what went well, and what didn’t go well.

When we worked in an office, we booked out a meeting room and wrote on Post-It notes and placed them on a whiteboard. Since we are working from home now, we needed an online solution. We used the Retrospective board on Microsoft’s Azure Devops; which worked well.

There were a few interesting points I wanted to note down. One point I strongly agreed with, and the other two points I think either: I am deluded, or the rest of the team are.

“Part time Product Owner”. When our team was formed, we were told our product is really important. If it was important, we would have the correct staff in place, with a Product Owner in charge of providing us with requirements, or making decisions on well-defined requirements. At first, we didn’t have a Product Owner. Then later, we got one, but she was split between two products and we were always low priority. Due to this, some of my work ended up being shelved because I had implemented the requirements I knew about, but I knew there was much more to it, so raised questions that were never answered.

“Need to stop working at pace, otherwise we will all burn out.” This is absolute nonsense; we are so slow. This is basically a reference to what the Head Of Development said in Team Summary, but other managers have used the phrasing “working at pace”, so now people in the team are regurgitating it.

“Code Analysis work going fast” First of all, the people responsible for analysing the data were dragging it out as long as possible, see The Code Analysis Meetings (It’s a great read [if I’m allowed to promote my own blog]). Also, Colin has been leading a small team to actually fix these “problems”.
A) they are making changes manually and progress is slow. The changes are simple, and they can get Visual Studio to fix them without extra input.

B) Colin was taking days to review them, so I ended up stepping in and reviewing the code for him. 

We get to the end of the retro, having gone through the full board. The final stage is to vote on the items that are suggestions on what to “do”/”stop doing” in future.

“I can’t see my items on here”

Becky

It turns out she has added her items to another team’s board. 🤦

I don’t get how we can go through the ENTIRE board and only then does she realise that we haven’t talked about the four items that she added.