Lessons Learned: Retrospectives: A union of team honesty and responsibilty

Having been in a number of retrospectives I love the dialogue where team members are not afraid to say what they really think.

• If something was a lemon, then lets chat about it! 
• If something was great, let's praise and continue it! 
• If something was only lukewarm let's at least acknowledge it and see how we can improve it!

And equally so where the team takes responsibility for the evolving action points to put things right!

• What is it that I can do that can make a difference?
• If the test team cannot easily write tests how can we adjust the process that it is so?
• A developer might say I don't think I can solve this, but let's time box it for 2 days to see what can be achieved.

Without the honesty a team does not have the true chance to improve the development cycle for all team members! And without individual responsibility on action points the same faults will keep arising and we loose faith in the retrospective process. So perhaps with no surprise, a combination of both lack of honesty and responsibility may mean cancelling the retrospective process altogether! Horror!!

So how exactly do we encourage the team to be honest?

• The faults of the team should not be attributed the individual. 
• Supporting the team to be honest about what they really think.

Then encouraging individual responsibility on action points? This is not as clear cut. But there at least needs to be:

• Room to manoeuvre in the backlog to implement the action point tasks. (That not on top of normal allocated tasks.)
• The support of the team where a team member could not resolve an action point in the time allocated.

There is of course much more to retrospectives than team honesty and responsibility of action tasks, but it's a great start!