How many types of Agile Retrospectives are there, anyway?

The other day I noticed that we were getting pretty stagnant with our sprint retrospectives.  I have been asking these questions: “What went well? What went less well? What areas improved from last sprint? What areas need improvement?”  Sometimes we get some good discussions going, but most of the time I have to prod my teammates for answers and feedback.  This prompted me to go in search of something new and better. 

I have 4 teams, so it is important for me to come up with good ideas that can be used across the board.  My teams are also spread across the United States and Canada, so activities in which ALL of us can participate is definitely limited.  Pickings were slim.

I found a nice wiki that listed out many different types of retrospectives.  I pulled the below table from there. I had NO IDEA there were so many, and there were quite a few listed that I'd never heard of before. You can go to the link to delve further into each type of retrospective if you like.  This was a good start for me to get some ideas.

Name	Summary	Use	Approx. Duration (mins)
6 Thinking Hats Retrospective	Uses De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats to investigate process improvement	General use, but also a good alternative to shuffling card type retrospectives	60
Pillars Of Agile Spiderweb Retrospective	A retrospective in which teams rated their abilities in each of the categories, displayed the different ratings on a spider graph, and then discussed the result.	To talk about what abilities are important to an Agile team and how your team rates against them	60
Appreciative Retrospective	Uses Appreciative Inquiry to identify what went so well. There is no blame or negativity, and builds on the Prime Directive, that everyone in the team did the best job they could possibly do.	To remind everyone what a good job their doing rather than focusing on negatives every time you run a retrospective.	60
Top 5	Participants choose top 5 issues and bring them along for group to discuss and resolve	Expose the most pressing issues in an initially anonymous manner and determine the most effective actions to resolve them	45
Plan of Action	A Retrospective Technique for short term actions from long term goals	Really good for forcing achievable actions from your retrospectives.	40
Start, Stop, Continue, More of, Less of Wheel	The facilitator captures team open-ended feedback using a wheel that encourages team members to assess an iteration or milestone using 5 categories. Allow some time following completing the “wheel” to discuss and agree on specific changes to implement	Obtain feedback on team process in order to learn what should be continued and what should be adjusted as the team moves forward. Is a fast way to conduct a “meta” process discussion.	10-25
Each One Meets All	The method ensures that each participant meets and interacts with every other participant.	When retrospective participants do not know each other well	Variable!
The Complexity Retrospective	Use various tools such as a complexity radar to discover and find out how to deal with the complexity in your project	Many projects go awry due to excessive complexity; use this plan to evaluate whether your team is approaching things in the simplest way that can work; especially when the deadlines begin to loom.	40-60
Force Field Analysis	A plan designed around the force field analysis technique	A retrospective for your whole company/department or to analyse a particular topic	60
Pomodoro Retrospective	Focused and time-constrained by using the Pomodoro technique	Useful for determining a single action to improve the work of a small team	25
Retrospective Surgery	A retrospective for retrospectives	To learn how to improve the effectiveness of your retrospectives	60+
Questions Retrospective	Iteration retrospective	To get different perspectives on the same events	60
Everyday Retrospective	Simple sprint retrospective	Basic / everyday retrospective plan	90 - 120
Four L's Retrospective	Liked – Learned – Lacked – Longed For	Iteration and project retrospectives as well as for retrospection of training and conference events.	90 - 120
Sailboat	What anchors slow the team down, what wind propels it forward?	Good for the "gather data" and "generate insights" portions of a retrospective	90 - 120
Weekly Retrospective Simple + delta	Review, Plus-Delta, Vote, Actions, Owners	A weekly retrospective for your project	60
Jeopardy Retrospective	Use the answers as base to get all the good things and bad things that happened	A different way to "gather data" and to get all different opinions on a subject	60
Bubble Up	An approach to scaling retrospectives by collecting outcomes across an Agile Release Train, Tribe or any multi team scenario.	Use for understanding challenges and opportunities across when scaling agile.	15-30

I’ve decided to try a few of these: Plan of Action, Start /Stop/ Continue/ More of/ Less Wheel, Retrospective Surgery, Four Ls Retrospective, and Bubble Up .  I also like the ideas listed in the Everyday Retrospective, but I’m not sure I can cram all of that into the 15 minutes I have allotted for each team scrum.  In any case, I’ll chronicle the results here over the next few weeks. 

I was most excited about Sailboat, because it was touted as being great for distributed teams.  I was excited until I went to the website and found that it is no longer available as a collaborative game.  However, there are many other tools on that website that I found useful.  For instance, I might do the “Actions for Retrospectives” game with my distributed teams.  You can check out all the fun at http://innovationgames.com/resources/instant-play-games/ .  I might try using the Sailboat, though, for co-located teams. 

If you have any retrospective ideas you’d like to share, please let me know!  I welcome your feedback!