Agile Retrospectives

4.4 Activity: Working Agreements

Use this to set the stage in an iteration, release, or project retrospective.

Purpose

Establish a set of behaviors that will support the team in having productive discussions. Establish that team members are responsible for monitoring their interactions. Provide candidates for day-to-day working agreements if the team doesn’t already have them.

Time needed

Ten to thirty minutes, depending on the size of the group.

Description

Team members work together to generate ideas for effective behaviors at work then choose five to seven agreements to guide team interactions or processes.

Steps

After the retrospective leader welcomes the participants and reviews the goal and agenda, the team works in pairs or small groups (no more than four in a group) to develop candidate working agreements. Going around the room, each group reports their most important proposed working agreement. When all the unique proposed working agreements are collected, the retrospective leader helps the group make needed amendments and select three to seven working agreements that will set the standard for behavior during the retrospective.

1. Explain the activity: “We’ll develop a set of working agreements for the retrospective so that everyone will know our expectations for working together. It will be each team member’s responsibility to follow the agreements and the job of the whole team to notice and bring it to the team’s attention when an agreement is violated. The purpose ...