Step 1: Before the agile retrospective meeting starts the moderator should create and hang up four posters with the headers Liked, Lacked, Learned and Longed for. As soon as you get used to it you don’t want to miss it anymore in your working routines. Thus we will give you a few tips and tricks to implement them in your agile collaboration. Getting used to new working habits isn’t easy. You can even do your online retros in there – it is a great tool, feel free to have a look: One simple hack by the way: you can jump into Echometer retrospective tool without login and have a look at their retrospective ideas for free. Be aware of setting realistic goals and working on them step by step. This phase helps your team to set specific goals which you can work on during your next sprint. Questions that can be asked are: What did you desire in your last sprint? What was still missing for perfect cooperation?Īs well as the discussion points in the third phase this can be referred to technical and nontechnical topics. Only when it is known what went well, what went badly and what you have already learned, you can determine what is still missing. It is the last phase because the three phases of the 4L Retrospective build up to this final discussion. As you can probably guess this means discussing what was missing in your last sprint. Last but not least: The fourth phase means Longed for. The Learned-phase is important because despite discussing positive parts of your last sprint your team members will start detecting what they learned throughout your collaboration (and probably throughout your recent agile retrospectives). This can be referred to technical (for example detecting the relevance of running safety checks) and nontechnical (for example detecting the importance of keeping each other informed) topics. Instead of discussing the positive parts of the collaboration in general it aims to specifically find out what has been learned throughout the last sprint. The difference is that it is a little more specific.
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It can therefore seem like it’s similar to the first phase and hence redundant. The penultimate phase is also used to figure out what went well. The third of the four L’s is short for Learned. This phase aims to reach several different goals: Find out what are your main difficulties and use them to improve your collaboration. Instead you should use this phase for constructive feedback and the development of suggestions for improvement. What could you have done better? As described before even this phase shouldn’t be about whining. Throughout this phase the team members should discuss what they missed during the last sprint.
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Furthermore, it is very helpful if one recognizes well-running processes as such and can directly continue to use them. Instead they are a tool to keep the team updated and to help running the collaboration more smoothly. Agile retrospective meetings shouldn’t be used to complain all the time. Questions that can be asked are: What went well? What did I like about our collaboration? What was better than in the sprint before? What should we keep using in our next sprint?įirst of all, it is always important to talk about the positive things in order to keep the team members motivated. In this part of the retrospective the team should examine what they liked about the last sprint and discuss what went better than initially expected. One of the four L’s is the section Liked.
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To give you further information on this agile retrospective technique we’ll give you detailed information on what the essence of 4L retrospectives are. Despite that 4L retrospective support looking at the events from a factual perspective rather than an emotional one. In general it can be said that 4L retrospectives are useful when you want to emphasize the positive (Liked and learned) as well as the negative (Lacked and Longed for) working behaviours. One of those techniques is the 4L retrospective.ĤL retrospectives include four different attributes that categorise the discussion points. There are many different agile retrospective techniques that can be used to structure your retrospective. You can read further into this topic in our article about How to run great retrospectives. In general agile retrospective meetings are defined as regular meetings of a team to examine past collaboration and to derive suggestions for improvement for future cooperation. Since there are many different ways on how to set them up it can be quite difficult to see through all the possibilities that are given. Agile retrospective meetings are a major part of agile collaboration.