The majority of the Agile disciplines are structured processes.  At the daily stand up the team answers three simple questions.  Backlog grooming is focussed on the user stories, and demo days are focussed on presenting to the business stakeholders.

Retrospectives however provides us with the ability to inject some fun and variability into the process.

There is a number of website available that provide ideas on the different was to run a retrospective.

Some examples are:

[[websites]]

{{One we use a lot is anchors and engines.   It involves drawing a water line near the top of the whiteboard and drawing a speedboat with a big engine on the water.  Then you draw a anchor at the bottom of the ocean and a line to the boat.

It usually looks something like this.

Teams write three things that they liked about the sprint or that made the sprint go faster and stick them near the boat.  They write three things that didn’t go so well, slowed the sprint down or should be the focus for improvement in the next sprint.  These go near the anchor.

They then are given 6 dots and can put them on the three stickers they think should be the focus for improvement in the next sprint.  Three dots for their highest priority, two dots for the next priority and one dot for the last.

There will be an obvious cluster of dots once the team have finished and that is the areas they have agreed to work on next as a result of the restrospective.

}}

So every couple of sprints I suggest the scrum master picks a new way of running the restrospective session.  It can help make what can sometimes be a tense and introverted session into something fun.