The Story of Our Sprints

Timing: 10 mins

Ingredients:

• People and space
• 1 stop watch
• Optionally, something to record the audio with.

Directions:

Have the team sit/stand in a circle. You want to get a story of the last sprint that is told by the entire team. You start by saying ‘Once upon a time , we had a X (insert sprint length here!) week sprint…’. Then, the next person to your left adds to your sentence and this carries on until the last person has spoken or if the story is developing in an interesting direction, until all the points appear to have been made and there is nothing of value coming through. You might want to strictly enforce the time limit for a large team.

After the retrospective , you could run the game again to tell the story of the next sprint, and this should galvanise the improvements that will take place and nicely summarise the lessons learnt and help the team visualise how the next sprint could be better. This game helps to create an ongoing shared goal and represents an oral history of the software process.

Learning Points:

• Discover a consensus view of the success/failures from the last sprint.
• Empower everyone to add value to a collective goal through participation.
• Exercise the ‘responding to change’ learning point from the word-at-a-time letter game.

CREDIT: Mike Sutton

Posted by Mike

Written by: Michael McCullough on June 20, 2009.
Last revised by: Tatyana Yanush on October 22, 2011.