Agile Patterns For Scrum Retrospectives

From Retrospectives Wiki

Back in 1990, we at Bell Labs Research tired of the ISO 9000 drudgery that was being held up as the hope of process excellence. We spent ten years researching and documenting effective practice--practice gathered in retrospectives on dozens of projects world-wide.. We captured the result in pattern form. The patterns encode compressed results from about 120 retrospectives on a wide variety of projects in the last decade of the last century.

Early publications on these findings influenced the Agile miljø, including what we call Scrum meetings today [1] and of much of the structural component of XP [2]. In the early days of Scrum, Mike Beedle and colleagues wrote up some patterns of Scrum as a small pattern language; see more about this at [3].

We started using these patterns to take Agile teams through a retrospective process, helping them to reflect from a new perspective. As Scrum grew in popularity we encountered more and more Scrum teams who could benefit from the technique. About a year ago we undertook an effort to build a taxonomy of Scrum itself using the patterns, and socialized the effort with the CampScrum (http://www.campscrum.com) crowd in October 2007. This leed to a great meeting of the minds on using Organizational Patterns as a Scrum retrospective technique [4].

In short, the Organizational Patterns go to the most crucial issues underlying Scrum. What surprised all of us is that Scrum is as large as it is. Though most of you can probably describe most of Scrum in two minutes, it takes at least 38 patterns to go to the heart of its principles. So while it is simple, it is also complex in some sense. Such a model goes a long way to explain why Scrum is so easy to describe, yet hard to do. Considering each of these patterns in turn helps an organization quickly find its weak spots and opportunity to improvements. Further, the patterns provide solutions that serve as inspirations for creative problem-solving. Most of their power is in reflection and introspection: the true power of a retrospective.

At the Retrospective Facilitators' Gathering in Bath, in April 2008, Jens Østergaard ran an Open Space on Organizational Patterns as a retrospective technique. This session helped bring focus to some of the important links between more traditional retrospective techniques, and the gaps in those techniques that Organizational Patterns helped to fill. You can see the notes at [5].

Then in June of 2008, we held a retreat at Stora Nyteboda in Sweden where we again refined this taxonomy of patterns. The first triage sought out those patterns necessary to running a successful Scrum. Some of them are not part of the Scrum core, but experience has shown that it is impossible to run a successful Scrum without them. For many of them, Jeff Sutherland said that he never has, and never would, consider starting up a Scrum without them. You can see this set of patterns at the community's web page. [6]

We further refined the patterns into general-purpose versus software-only Scrum patterns. The above collection features the patterns that are germane to Scrum in general, with no software specificity. A separate and much smaller list delineates the patterns necessary to running a software Scrum. It can be found at [7].

The patterns retrospective approach is a triadic group introspective technique whose roots come from social network theory and Moreno's notion of sociodrama. The technique is described in more detail at:

   Social patterns in productive software development organizations [8]

At this writing, Dina Friis is acting as ScrumMaster for a research project to create a more rigorous and formal model that correlates results from the technique to Scrum success and to the basic Scrum foundations; other principals in the research are Gertrud Bjørnvig and Jens Østergaard, with contributions and advice from Jim Coplien and Jeff Sutherland. We have also put together some frameworks for rolling out the technique for organizations seeking support in these techniques. We are slowly growing a community of facilitators, with the goal of spreading the technique.