Retrospective with Sailboat

Have you ever got bored with the Retrospective meeting? I have, sometime. Most of the times, this meeting just goes traditionally by answering three questions: "What good things have we done? What bad things have we done? And, what actions should we improve?" Ever and ever again! My team found a way to make it a little bit more exciting. The idea is that each member - not only our Scrum Master - will become a host. If a meeting is hosted by a memeber, the next meeting will be hold by another one.

Yeah, I used "Sailboat" pattern in my turn. So, I just want to share with you guys how it was.

I started the meeting by telling a short story that I hoped everyone in my team could recall the meaning behind of Retrospective meetings:

There is a group of people trying pick up trash in a park. At the first look, the park seem not to have a lot of trash because they are spread out all over the place. However, these people continuously found trash when they started. They kept picking them up until the whole park is clean.

What exactly I did mean from this story is "just keep improving". In my opition, Retrospective is the time for us to look back what "trash" are found and try to eliminate them continuously.

Next, I drew a picture about sailing boat as a metaphor for the team. (The following is my own painting; it took me nearly one hour to complete. Haha!)

All parts of this picture are numberd from 1 to 5 with my explaination below:

[1]. Sailing boat: the team

[5]. Happy island: Sprint goal (or team's goal in general)

[2]. Wind: motivator - what moves the boat forward

[3]. Anchor: impediment - what slows the boat down

[4]. Rock: pitfall - what dangerous things are able to stop the boat

Whole members thought about it in 5 minutes, then I picked a member randomly to talk about her/his own opinions. Next, this member again selected randomly another one.

Thanks to this visualized method, I saw the meeting went more exciting with a lot of issues were discussed easily.

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Books Read in 2022

My bookshelf Technical - Operating System: Three Easy Pieces. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. - The Effective Engineer. Edmond Lau. - English Grammar in Use. Raymond Murphy - Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering. Brooks Jr., Frederick P. - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd edition). Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister. - A Philosophy of Software Design. John Ousterhout. - Modern Computer Architecture and Organization: Learn x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures and the design of smartphones, PCs, and cloud servers. Jim Ledin. Thought Provoking - Đúng Việc. Giản Tư Trung. - A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking. - Một đời như kẻ tìm đường. Phan Văn Trường. - Một đời thương thuyết. Phan Văn Trường. - Tinh hoa xử thế - Dám bị ghét. Kishimi Ichiro, Koga Fumitake. - Phép màu để vượt lên chính mình. Nhan Húc Quân. - Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship Through Woodcraft. Robert Baden-Powell. - Thay Đổi Cuộc Sống Với Nhân ...

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