How to use TestSphere for retrospectives

Being a testmanager and a scrum master, I was thinking about how to use the TestSphere deck not just for testing themed activities but for regular team or sprint retrospectives as well. My retrospectives usually go along the pretty popular five stage model:

1. Set the stage

2. Gather data

3. Generate insight

4. Decide what to do

5. Close the retro

In my experience the card deck can be especially useful in the first two stages. Something I tried and was pretty satisfied with is this:

In order to get everyone involved and thinking, I had all the feeling cards of TestSphere spread out on the tables in a meeting room. I had the team walk around then and read the cards all by themselves in order to have them think about possible feelings towards the last sprint. After a few minutes,  everyone would go to the card that they felt was most matching their feelings towards the sprint and had everyone explain shortly about why they felt belonging there. As a Scrum Master you could write down how many positive, negative or neutral people there are. I didn’t, but would do so the next time.

This is really the end of the of stage one.  But as the team is now familiarized with the feelings cards, I fused those into the stage of collecting data. This integrates nicely and I feel it also enhances the flow of the retrospective. I now had each team member write a sprint related topic (concern, theme, good example,  bad example) on a sticky note. Only after everyone’s finished, I had them associate their stickies to one of the feeling cards still on the tables. Everyone then introduced their topic and why it made them feel that certain way. We did two rounds of this and by this created quite a pool of topics for the remainder of the retrospective. What I really liked was the emotional component to it, as expressing your feelings was an important part of it. Sometimes it helps to understand why a problem is so important to a person, not just on a logical level,  but on an emotional level as well.

I was thinking about using the other card categories to generate insight on topics, but decided against it for the moment, but will certainly reconsider it for future retrospectives.