Agile Retrospectives Assessment Survey A Great Exercise

Hi guys, in this post I will explain how can you use Team Assessment Survey as a tool for a retrospective. At my current job, I was exposed to the SAFe framework by Dean Leffingwell, this framework provides a team assessment survey, and the exercise that I will teach here is an adaptation of Dean's assessment. The original assessment can be found here.

This exercise can be found in the book: "Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives", a book written by me and Ben Linders with the foreword from Esther Derby. The book can be downloaded for free on LeanPub.com or InfoQ.com, please download it and spread it among your colleagues.

If you are interested in getting some extra Agile Retrospectives exercises, I created a blog post with dozens of Agile Retrospectives Ideas, check them and see if you find something interesting.

What you can expect to get out of this technique

The purpose of this exercise is to analyze how teams are performing in different areas and identify possible improvements to be taken in the near future (next sprint?). The assessment has four main areas:

• Product Ownership Health - How the product owner is performing
• Sprint Health - How activities within the sprint are being managed
• Team Health - How healthy is the team spirit within the team
• Technical Health - How well the team has implemented technical best practices

Each of the areas has different questions that can be rated from zero to five, allowing the team to visualize what are the areas that need more attention from the team.

This is a great exercise to reveal the overall agile health of a team.

When you would use this technique

I believe this technique is quite simple and does not require any special occasion. Although, it might be suitable for situations when a team wants to understand better how well they are implementing Agile. This exercise will not solve specific problems that occurred during the sprint but might reveal some of the causes of why those problems happened. For example, if the team is finding a lot of bugs during development it might be that their Unit Testing, or automation practices are not being well implemented.

How to do it

To Perform this exercise you just need an Excel sheet. As I said before that excel Well has four main areas (Product Ownership Health, Sprint Health, Team Health, and Technical Health). For each different area, you create several questions that you think are appropriate for your team. You can always refer to the questions from the SAFe Team Scrum XP assessment that you can find here. Below I list two questions as an example for each different area.

Product Ownership Health:

• Product Owner facilitates user story development, prioritization, and negotiation
• Product Owner collaborates proactively with Product Management and other stakeholders

Sprint Health:

• The team plans the sprint collaboratively, effectively, and efficiently
• The team always has clear sprint goals, in support of PSI (do readers know what PSI is?) objectives, and commits to meeting them

Team Health:

• Team members are self-organized, respect each other, help each other complete sprint goals, manage inter-dependencies and stay in sync with each other
• Stories are iterated through the sprint with multiple define-build-test cycles (e.g. the sprint is not waterfalled)

Technical Health:

• Automated acceptance tests and unit tests are part of the story DoD
• Refactoring is always underway

All these questions can be rated from zero to five, zero means "Never", and five means "Always".

During the retrospective, the team just needs to fill the Excel file as a team and evaluate themselves to see where they stand. If you want, you can create a nice graphic to easily see the result of the assessment. An example can be seen in the picture on the right side.

Visualizing the graphic will give a team a good understanding of where they stand, with the graphic in front of them they should decide which area they want to improve, again choosing only one area at the time and one topic within the area.

Like many other exercises that I explained this exercise does not require to have a collocated team (true, but they would need some kind of scoring and voting mechanism). This exercise can be run in a virtual setup where the team is spread all over the world.

What do you think about this exercise? Do you think it could be useful for you? Please leave me your ideas.

In Summary

An Agile Retrospective is an event that ́s held at the end of each iteration in Agile Development and it serves for the team to reflect on how to become more effective, so they can tune and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

I believe the SailBoat exercise is quite a simple Agile Retrospective Exercise and does not require any special occasion.

If you are interested in getting some extra Agile Retrospectives exercises, I created a blog post with dozens of Agile Retrospectives Ideas, check them and see if you find something interesting.