Today I attended an Agile Retrospective meeting at Company X. These meetings are held at the end of each project, this is the 2nd one I have had the pleasure to attend ;).
There is a structure which actually keeps it interesting. Firstly you rate yourself from 1-5 being (I’m trying to recall the descriptions - some are made up slightly but I hope you get the point)
1. Just a smiler
2. Will talk about things if cornered
3. Will talk occasionally about things
4. Will actively discuss most things
5. Will discuss/argue anything (perhaps for the sake of it)
I was a 4. I don’t like arguing for the sake of it. Most people in the room out of 11 declared themselves a 5. Although I’d say only 3 were ranters (5).
Next, there were 4 charts A0 size on the wall. Each one titled:
- “What we did well”,
- “What we did poorly”,
- “What puzzled you”,
- “Top Tips”.
We were asked to write 3 issues for each chart and they were stuck on the chart. For the Top Tip chart we wrote 1 issue, they were all stuck on the chart and then we voted. Duplicate issues were purged.
Some of the Top Tips were:
- Write a Domain/Persistence layer using Hibernate, to replace the current db layer
- More openly discuss issues as they arise, involve management, instead of waiting for a meeting.
- Allow more time to define Stories from the Product Requirements Document
- Fix the slow build on continuous integration
- Replace CVS with Subversion
- Replace Eclipse with Intellij for its benefits of better Refactoring
Quite an effective meeting but certainly required a good chairperson as it did get quite roudy at times. Plus the flicking of paper across the room got out of hand at times, although good fun 
The issues go into a summary document and fed back to the business and technology areas for improvement.
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