Agile Retrospectives

1.2 Gather Data

It may seem silly to gather data for an iteration that lasted a week or two. But when someone misses one day in a weeklong iteration, they’ve missed 20% of the events and interactions. Even when people are present, they don’t see everything, and different people have different perspectives on the same event. Gathering data creates a shared picture of what happened. Without a common picture, individuals tend to verify their own opinions and beliefs. Gathering data expands everyone’s perspective.

Start with the hard data: events, metrics, features or stories completed, and so forth. Events can include meetings, decision points, changes in team membership, milestones, celebrations, adopting new technologies—any event that had meaning to someone on the team. Metrics include burndown charts, velocity, defect counts, number of stories completed, amount of code refactored, effort data, and so forth. Encourage people to refer to team calendars and other artifacts—documents, emails, charts—to add to the picture.

For an hour-long retrospective, you can ask people to report verbally on data and events or use the team’s task board and big visible charts. When your team looks back more than a week or two, create a visual record using a timeline or data charts. A visual depiction of data and events makes it easier for people to see patterns and make connections.

Hard facts are only part of the data. Feelings are at least half the story. Feelings tell what’s important to ...