I’ve used relatively standard Agile Retrospective questions to great success over my career:

• What’s one word that best describes this sprint? (one per person)
• What were the positive aspects of this sprint that we’d like to persist?
• What were the deltas we’d like to change?
• How can we change our behavior, process, or definition of done to address the above?
• What actions can we take (with volunteered date commitments from one or more individuals) to address the above?
• And the most important “Big Daddy” that we should ask ourselves constantly… Why? Repeat that one another four times…

While this is a nice base, I’ve been looking for other questions to ask. Here’s several that I liked from Ben Linder’s blog, Sharing My Experience:

• What still puzzles us?
• What helps you to be successful as a team?
  • How did you do it?
• Where and when did it go wrong in this sprint?
• What do you expect, from who?
• Which tools or techniques proved to be useful? Which not?
• What is you biggest impediment?
• If you could change 1 thing, what would it be?
• What caused the problems that you had in this sprint?

Here are some nice why examples:

• Why did you do it like this?
• Why did this (or didn’t this) work for you?
• Why do you consider something to be important?
• Why do you feel this way?
• Why did you decide to work together on this?

From Debategraph, I liked “What don’t we know yet?”

Are there other questions you like to ask during retrospectives?

Photo from Magnus D on flickr