Retrospective Plans

A collection of detailed retrospective plans you can run or take inspiration from. If you've been in or ran a retrospective you really liked please add it.

If you have a plan you'd like to add, please read this first.

If you are not the originating author of the retrospective please ensure you have permission to reproduce it and credit them as the source.

Name	Summary	Use	Approx. Duration (mins)
6 Thinking Hats Retrospective	Uses De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats to investigate process improvement	Quite a different approach intended to provoke different ways of thinking. A good alternative to the usual post-it note/card type retrospectives	60
Pillars Of Agile Spiderweb Retrospective	A retrospective in which teams rated their abilities in each of the categories, displayed the different ratings on a spider graph, and then discussed the result.	To talk about what abilities are important to an Agile team and how your team rates against them	60
Appreciative Retrospective	Uses Appreciative Inquiry to identify what went so well. There is no blame or negativity, and builds on the Prime Directive, that everyone in the team did the best job they could possibly do.	To remind everyone what a good job their doing rather than focusing on negatives every time you run a retrospective.	60
Strengths-Based Retrospective	A strength-based retrospective consists of two steps: discovering strengths, then defining actions that use them.	Come up with actions that result in doing more of the things that you are already doing and which you are good at.	45-90
Top 5	Participants choose top 5 issues and bring them along for group to discuss and resolve	Expose the most pressing issues in an initially anonymous manner and determine the most effective actions to resolve them	45
Plan of Action	A Retrospective Technique for short term actions from long term goals	Really good for forcing achievable actions from your retrospectives.	40
Start, Stop, Continue, More of, Less of Wheel	The facilitator captures team open-ended feedback using a wheel that encourages team members to assess an iteration or milestone using 5 categories. Allow some time following completing the “wheel” to discuss and agree on specific changes to implement	Obtain feedback on team process in order to learn what should be continued and what should be adjusted as the team moves forward. Is a fast way to conduct a “meta” process discussion.	10-25
Each One Meets All	The method ensures that each participant meets and interacts with every other participant.	When retrospective participants do not know each other well	Variable!
The Complexity Retrospective	Use various tools such as a complexity radar to discover and find out how to deal with the complexity in your project	Many projects go awry due to excessive complexity; use this plan to evaluate whether your team is approaching things in the simplest way that can work; especially when the deadlines begin to loom.	40-60
Force Field Analysis	A plan designed around the force field analysis technique	A retrospective for your whole company/department or to analyse a particular topic	60
Pomodoro Retrospective	Focused and time-constrained by using the Pomodoro technique	Useful for determining a single action to improve the work of a small team	25
Retrospective Surgery	A retrospective for retrospectives	To learn how to improve the effectiveness of your retrospectives	60+
Questions Retrospective	Iteration retrospective	To get different perspectives on the same events	60
Everyday Retrospective	Simple sprint retrospective	Basic / everyday retrospective plan	90 - 120
Four L's Retrospective	Liked – Learned – Lacked – Longed For	Iteration and project retrospectives as well as for retrospection of training and conference events.	90 - 120
Sailboat	What anchors slow the team down, what wind propels it forward?	Good for the "gather data" and "generate insights" portions of a retrospective	90 - 120
Weekly Retrospective Simple + delta	Review, Plus-Delta, Vote, Actions, Owners	A weekly retrospective for your project	60
Jeopardy Retrospective	Use the answers as base to get all the good things and bad things that happened	A different way to "gather data" and to get all different opinions on a subject	60
Bubble Up	An approach to scaling retrospectives by collecting outcomes across an Agile Release Train, Tribe or any multi team scenario.	Use for understanding challenges and opportunities across teams when scaling agile.	15-30
Tiny Retrospective	A look at some of the smaller changes that the team could make.	Use to get the team to focus on the really small things that can sometimes make a big difference.	60
An Agile Christmas Carol	A light weight Christmas themed retrospective inspired by Dickens' A Christmas Carol	An approach to reflecting on the year that was and making wishes for the year ahead.	60
Deep Tissue Massage Retrospective	Massage out your team's sore knots: Tackle those common themes that come up again and again.	Targeted retrospective to tackle some of those lingering issues	60
Glad, Sad, Mad	Categorize issues as those that made you glad, sad or mad.	A fairly basic, “no gimmicks” retrospective plan.	60
Do-Si-Do	Team members move from station to station like an old fashioned dance.	An approach that allows team members to focus on actions.	60-90
A Serious (Play) Retro	A retrospective in which the team builds Lego models to assess their performance.	To create a playful mindset from which to more honestly self-evaluate.	60
Guess Who?	An 'empathy hack' retro designed for team members to see others' points of view.	When you're looking to build team cohesion.	60
Scrum Values	A look from two angles on how the team evaluates their adherence to the Scrum Values.	To get a common understanding of the Scrum Values, evaluate how the team adheres to them and dig deeper in the context of transparency, inspection and adaptation.	60
Facebook Reactions Retrospective	A simple and refreshing variation of the very popular "Glad", "Sad", "Mad" retrospective.	Instead of the original three "Glad", "Sad", "Mad" columns the team uses the following six: "Liked", "Loved", "Made me laugh", "Surprised me", "Made me sad", "Made me angry" inspired by the reactions feature used on Facebook.	60-120
2 fast 2 valuable	A way for a team to talk about how their ways of working impact how effective they are	Useful when a team is newly formed or have different ways of working (for example if they don't pair program)	60-120
Mountain Hiking	A way for a team to talk about goals, risks, impediments in the sprint.	Useful when a team is not sure of team goal, and would like them to think about the risks and impediments.	60-120
Fly High	A way for a team to talk about team level and organizational level impediments.	Useful when a team is not sure of what impediments the teams can resolve by themselves and what cannot.	60
Highway Drive	A way for a team to talk about team goals, risks, impediments and enablers during their sprints.	Useful for understanding the team's thoughts and ideas in terms of small and big blockers, enablers .	60
Snakes and Ladders	A way for a team to talk about impediments and enablers during their sprints.	Useful for understanding the team's thoughts on what is helping them during the sprint and what is not, and also talk about the action items .	60
Basket Ball	A way for a team to discuss how can they work as an agile team.	Useful for brainstorming what it takes for team members working in silos to start working as an agile team.	60
A-Team	A way for a team to discuss goals, achievements, particularities and team work.	Useful as an alternative to a basic retrospective.	60
Our Empathy Survey Says – Awesome Retro	A fun gameshow-style format, guessing what others have answered.	Designed to create the circumstances for empathy to grow within the team in a fun way whilst also generating improvement ideas.	30-60
White Elephant Retro	A fun, out-of-the-box, non-sprint-focused retro	Good for learning about other team members’ values, needs, and concerns.	30-60
Futurespective: learning from failures that haven't happened yet	Use shared storytelling to imagine disastrously bad futures for a team's work, and agree how to avoid them.	Good for helping surface shared but unspoken worries, and identifying ways to mitigate risks.	60