The Mario Kart Sprint Retrospective
One of my favourite Scrum events is the Sprint Retrospective — an opportunity for the whole team to get together, use the data they’ve collected, reflect on the past sprint and adapt their processes for the better.
I find that Sprint Retrospectives can soon become stale if the same format is used every time. By asking the team a different set of questions to normal, in a fun and engaging way it is more likely that the team will open up to the session and engage with one another in a more meaningful way.
In my time as a Delivery Lead I’ve tried many different formats (like my Donkey Kong one). Putting the questions in a context that the team will all be familiar with usually helps. Based on the classic console game Mario Kart, the Mario Kart Sprint Retrospective is a fun and thought provoking format for your teams next retrospective. The team is represented by the Kart and by reflecting on their last sprint (race) needs to come up with actions that will help them be more successful.
After you’ve read the rest of this post, if you’d like to try it for yourself, you can find a template on Miroverse here.
How to use the Mario Kart Sprint Retrospective
On the last day of your sprint, set aside between 1 and 2 hours for this session depending on the size and maturity of your team. As an icebreaker I sometimes ask everyone to share who their favourite Mario Kart character is.
The format works by asking team members a set of questions. When you explain the questions to the team, encourage them to think beyond the questions on the board and think about what might be happening in the game — only now, the Kart is the team and the race is the Sprint.
- What slowed the team down? Did anyone or anything throw bananas at them? Did they slip on oil or holes in the track or were they successfully avoided? Who threw the bananas at them?
- What powered the team up? Where did they find the powerups? Were they in a risky shortcut or maybe they were stolen from another team?
- What are the team worried about? Are other teams or their dependencies going to overtake or push them off track? Is something coming from behind to knock them off course?
- What do the team wish they had during the sprint? What would be useful to help the team? Maybe a map on the screen? Better track knowledge? A faster Kart? What do they need to do to get those things?
Each member of the team should provide their own answers to the questions and share them back with the team. If team members have duplicates, that’s fine — start to create a cluster of similar ideas. Doing this will help show that an idea is on several peoples minds.
When everyone has shared all of their ideas, check that everyone understands them and then get the team to group similar items and threads together. Run a voting session to determine which are the groups priority items. Working through them in priority order ask the team what steps need to be taken in the next sprint to address these ideas.
- Maybe they found a powerup unexpectedly that fixed some brittle tests and they can share that knowledge with other teams?
- Maybe they slipped on another teams banana by finding problems during a late integration which can be fixed by integrating earlier when they do a similar piece of work in the next sprint?
When you have your actions, get the team members to volunteer to own them or add them to your teams backlog.
If you do run the session yourself, please let me know how you get on.
Full disclosure: The Mario Kart retro wasn’t actually my idea — it was originally conceived by Charlotte Hearne, an ace engineer I used to work with. I just removed all the gold plating, polished it up and built the template.
Doug Idle is a Principal Delivery Lead at Dunelm. When he’s not delivering awesomeness, he spends his time listening to Guns ’N’ Roses and racing karts across the southeast of the UK.
