Agile Principles Retrospective
Wow, the Agile principles! Together with the Agile values they form the Agile Manifesto, the foundation of all Agile frameworks. But while most scrum teams (hopefully) have at least some understanding of the values, the principles are a bit less on the forefront.
So I wanted to find a way to teach my team about the principles, because I feel if they understand and internalize the Agile values and principles, they have a profound basis to make their own autonomous choices.
Agile Principles Check In
In order to help my team get to know the principles I created this check in. I asked the team to fill out the chart and give each principle a number from 1 to 5 (from doing bad (1) to doing great (5)). We discussed the outliers before we went on to the rest of the retrospective.
(This chart was created on mentimeter.com. If you would like to use the Agile Principle spider chart, you can access the Menti presentation by making a free account.)
Agile Principles Retrospective
After that I asked the team to make couples and discuss the following questions together:
- Which 2 or 3 principles appeal to you most and why?
- How would these principles help the team improve their agile practice?
We came back together and each couple told the team about their discussion and findings. The team agreed on the most important principles to improve on (in this stage you might consider to use voting), and plenary we discussed:
- Which changes are needed to apply these principles in the team (even better)?
- Define the first steps we need to take.
The results of this session? Extended knowledge about the Agile principles, and defined steps to improve the Agile way of working.
