Starfish Retrospective

In most retrospectives there are three questions that are always asked: What went well, What did not go so well, what will be improved. These questions are common and usually cover all the points in a retrospective however in this paper I will be describing a new way to do a retrospective, the Starfish Graph.

The Starfish Graph consists of a circle with five words in it: Stop, Less, Keep, More and Start. With these words a team can get a better overall picture of what’s going on in their team as well as get a much better idea of what is working and what is not (Gonçalves).

Under Stop you would place anything that is a detriment to the team or anything that might not bring value to the team. You should definitely include any that do no bring any value to the customer.

Less refers to actions that aren’t worth the effort. Any action that brings in less value then it produces. This could also cover anything that might have been added into the group from the start but just aren’t working out or aren’t getting any better as time goes on.

Keep as it suggests would be any activity that is going well for the team. These should already be in use and are things you want to keep doing.

If your team is struggling with a certain aspect of the project then you might want to place it in the More category. More would be the place for anything that you want to improve on, that you feel you are neglecting.

And lastly Start is the place where you would put anything, be it ideas or tools or whatever, that your team would want to add in the next sprint.

In a sprint where the project suffers several setbacks, the Starfish Graph can be very valuable as it can be used to find exactly what areas went wrong and what you can do it fix them, by either removing them entirely, focusing more or less on them, or adding something else that might be able to counteract the problem. As the Starfish Graph is useful in pointing out not just the negative, but also the positive aspects of a project, it can be a good tool to use when working on the summery of a sprint. And since the Graph is very simple to set up, at times you don’t even need the whole team to set it up, though they should be there to discuss it before any changes are made.

Source

“Starfish Exercises” Luís Gonçalves, 8 Apr. 2017, luis-goncalves.com/starfish-exercise/.

Image: http://www.scielo.edu.uy/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0717-50002012000100002In most retrospectives there are three questions that are always asked: What went well, What did not go so well, what will be improved. These questions are common and usually cover all the points in a retrospective however in this paper I will be describing a new way to do a retrospective, the Starfish Graph.

The Starfish Graph consists of a circle with five words in it: Stop, Less, Keep, More and Start. With these words a team can get a better overall picture of what’s going on in their team as well as get a much better idea of what is working and what is not (Gonçalves).

Under Stop you would place anything that is a detriment to the team or anything that might not bring value to the team. You should definitely include any that do no bring any value to the customer.

Less refers to actions that aren’t worth the effort. Any action that brings in less value then it produces. This could also cover anything that might have been added into the group from the start but just aren’t working out or aren’t getting any better as time goes on.

Keep as it suggests would be any activity that is going well for the team. These should already be in use and are things you want to keep doing.

If your team is struggling with a certain aspect of the project then you might want to place it in the More category. More would be the place for anything that you want to improve on, that you feel you are neglecting.

And lastly Start is the place where you would put anything, be it ideas or tools or whatever, that your team would want to add in the next sprint.

In a sprint where the project suffers several setbacks, the Starfish Graph can be very valuable as it can be used to find exactly what areas went wrong and what you can do it fix them, by either removing them entirely, focusing more or less on them, or adding something else that might be able to counteract the problem. As the Starfish Graph is useful in pointing out not just the negative, but also the positive aspects of a project, it can be a good tool to use when working on the summery of a sprint. And since the Graph is very simple to set up, at times you don’t even need the whole team to set it up, though they should be there to discuss it before any changes are made.

Source

“Starfish Exercises” Luís Gonçalves, 8 Apr. 2017, luis-goncalves.com/starfish-exercise/.

Image: http://www.scielo.edu.uy/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0717-50002012000100002