The importance of having time to reflect back on the previous sprint is easy to see for any agile scrum team, it’s a time to acknowledge the good things the team have been doing and should continue doing, but also to highlight and discuss anything that the team feels has not gone so well. It is also an opportunity for the team to look at ways to improve or change the way in which they work in the coming sprints.

It's really important to have some achievable actions come out of the retrospective, this can be done by keeping the session focused and relevant, it can become all too easy for retrospectives to end up being a moaning session where nothing good or positive comes from them as a result.

Recently our team asked if we could come up with a new retrospective to try and freshen things up and bring a bit more fun to our sessions. After a bit of thought the PACMAN retrospective was created. Since the feedback from the team was really positive I wanted to share the retrospective so you could try it with your teams and hopefully have some fun at your next retrospective session too.

What's the setup?

There are 4 main areas of the PACMAN retrospective:

PACMAN – This is our team, trying to eat as many dots as we can without being caught by the Ghosts – this is what we do well as a team. (GREEN post-it notes)

Ghosts – These are the things in the last sprint that stopped us from achieving or goals OR have held us back. (PINK post-it notes)

Power pellets – These are the things in the last sprint that we did really well OR should be doing more of. (YELLOW post-it notes)

Remaining lives – These are the things we would like to do differently in the next sprint. (ORANGE post-it notes)

Next you need to draw a PACMAN arena on the whiteboard, which will include all the 4 areas outlined above (see example below):

Agile Scrum retrospectives - pacman retro example

Then run the retrospective by asking the team to write post-it notes that fall into each of the categories and stick them up on the board in the relevant area, once this has been done it's then an opportunity for the team to discuss the points raised in further detail focusing on the actions that can be taken out of the session.

Feel free to try this retrospective out with your teams and let me know how if it was successful or useful for you.

Here are some pictures of when our team ran this retrospective:

Agile Scrum retrospectives - pacman retro example Agile Scrum retrospectives - pacman retro example