Retrospective Dialogue Sheets

Retrospective Dialogue Sheets are large (A1) sheets of paper printed with instructions and questions for a retrospective. The sheets can be used to hold retrospectives without a facilitator. Users of the sheets commonly report:

• Fun and fresh retrospectives
• Increased participation, especially from team members who are normally quieter
• Facilitator does not become focus of attention or act "Team Leader-ish"
• More focus on the work and problems
• Reduced administration and bureaucracy

Although most of the teams using the sheets have some kind of Agile process not all users do. Some of the sheets are more general.

Sheets have also been used to hold distributed retrospectives with teams in different locations completing them separately and comparing their results.

The sheets are available for free download from Software Strategy or DialogueSheets.com.

Printing the sheets can present a barrier for those without a wide printer/plotter. There is a print-on-demand service from the download site but the postage costs can be expensive. Local commercial printers can often be quite cheap.

Several articles have been published about the sheets elsewhere:

• InfoQ, January 2012
• Methods & Tools, Fall 2011

Dialogue Sheets were originally invented at KTH in Stockholm and have been used in teaching at Cass Business School in London. [[Allan_kelly] used these ideas to produce the Retrospective sheets. He has several blog entries on the sheets too.

Currently all the sheets are in English, some sheets have been translated to Spanish and French and Allan happy to work with others if they wish to translate them.