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DAKI Retrospective
There are a lot of retrospective formats that exist today. Their end goal is the same. You might sometimes question why we need so many when one can do the job 😀 . Recurring meetings can often become a drag and fatigue might set into the team. Different formats enable organizers to switch things up a bit. When you ask the same questions in different ways you get new information. By trying different formats you can find the one that works best for your team.
DAKI(Drop-Add-Keep-Improve) is a great exercise for any team to evaluate the value that their current processes and practices are providing them. It consists of four categories across which users evaluate their last sprint. Let’s look at each of them:
Drop
Anything that is not working for the team and having a negative impact on the outcome of the project and morale of the team is added here. These things need to be dropped from the sprint. It could be a process, behavior or something else. Some examples of drop are:
Add
Incremental improvements are the backbone of agile development. And sprint retrospectives are a great way to introduce change in your sprint. This is a place for you to introduce new ideas to the group that can improve the health of the sprint. It could be something you read or a practice you followed with your earlier team. Some ideas that I have seen come up in sprint retrospectives:
Keep
Did you make a change in the last sprint that has had a positive impact? It is also a reminder of all great things that the team is doing that makes it possible for it to achieve its goals. If you loved something a teammate did and would like to thank them for it this is the place for it. A retrospective is never complete with shoutouts and kudos. In DAKI this is the place for them. Examples of Keep:
Improve
Some things are not providing the desired outcome. You expect them to work better. But they aren’t. These are things that are important and necessary and you can’t just drop them. This is the place for identifying these items and suggesting ways to improve them so that they work as intended. Some examples of improvements are:
A fun way to make your retrospective more interesting is by starting it with an icebreaker question. Icebreakers break the ice..lol. They help get people talking and warmed up to the idea of sharing with the group. Here are some examples of icebreaker questions:
Need more icebreaker questions? Checkout the complete list of over 300 icebreaker questions.
