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How to liven up retrospectives when they've gotten uneventful / unhelpful? (programming.dev)

submitted 9 months ago by flumph@programming.dev to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev

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My current team runs weekly retrospectives using the Lean Coffee format. More and more, I find that the items people are bringing up aren't really important or could just be a question in Slack.

For example, someone recently made a topic for how we can test credit card payments. Another topic was navel gazing about how we use Jira and multiple team members asked "what's the problem you're hoping to solve?" to which the only answer was "That's not what I've seen elsewhere".

I'm beginning to think that there's something wrong with our format or prompts, in that we aren't identifying important issues for discussion. Perhaps the format is stale or there's no serious issues lingering each week?

Any advice on alternative formats, how to get better feedback, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

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[–] flumph@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Is it fair to say that your process has stabilized in a good place? It sounds like your team is happy with the current way of doing things.

I think that's largely true. Not trying to assume intention, but I do think a few more of the junior folks on the team read something in a book or blog and think we have to do it that way. Or that it'll work for us because it worked for Etsy/Netflix/ThoughtWorks/etc.

Whenever I read about kanban, the author eventually talks about gathering metrics so the team can run experiments and see what happens to the metrics.

You know, metrics might be a great way to discuss some of these concerns/ideas are coming up. For example, the topic on Jira was related to Cycle Time. If we were concerned about Cycle Time, changing how we use Jira for a few weeks would see what happened to the metrics.