Retrospective
-------------

Here's a summary of the retrospective we ran during the face-to-face
meeting.  The retrospective is an important event that all agile
methods mandate.  It is a mechanism that encourages the team, and all
its stakeholders, to reflect on its performance.  This is an important
tenet in the concept of 'continuous improvement' that lies at the
heart of agile.

The retrospective focused on the main agile events we have:
- Daily stand-up
- Demo meeting
- Planning meeting

Participants were asked to write down on post-its issues that needed
to be addressed and positive things that we would benefit from doing
more of.  The post-its were placed on tables, available for all to
read and comment.  A simple color code was used to differentiate
positive from negative items.  From a range of issues that were raised
using this method, all participants where then asked to vote on the
ones they felt the strongest about, using a limited number of colored
sticky dots.  This allows the team to focus on the few most important
items first, in order to find concrete and positive solutions.  The
two items that received the most votes were:

1- Increasing clarity and priorities on our technical program of work
prior, to improve the planning meeting

2- Contrasting views on the effectiveness of the daily meetings

For the first item, we agreed that having the technical group ('The
Group') meetings would provide the right platform to discuss 'medium
term strategic' issues.  The technical group had not met as often as
it could have.  This was felt by all participants as the right forum
to address this issue.  We also agreed to keep the three weeks sprint
as a meeting frequency.  The time of the planning meeting was also
discussed, and Meb took the action to set-up a Doodle to see if we
could find a better time for the planning meeting, but also the demo
meeting.

For the second item regarding the daily meetings, since we had
opposite views on the effectiveness of this meeting, we discussed the
issue and tried to better understand everybody's viewpoints.  The
meetings are managed such that they never exceed 15 minutes (with only
one exception since the beginning of the project, with 16 minutes),
and normally are over in 10 minutes.  The daily meeting take place
every day at 10:30 (sharp!), Paris time. For people participating
regularly to the daily meetings, they are efficient and useful.
Others felt that the stand-ups were too frequent.  Alternatives were
discussed such as traditional sit-down weekly meetings, but these
would reduce the flow of communication, as well as our responsiveness,
and would force us to start taking and distributing minutes.

The compromise in the end was that the daily stand-ups will continue
with some people participating less frequently, but regularly.