Cupcakes are a good resource for retrospectives

Sharing is good

If you have never heard of it, go to http://www.tastycupcakes.com and look around. In their own words, “TastyCupcakes is a community-run site, founded by Michael McCullough and Don McGreal after they presented a series of games at Agile 2008 in Toronto. They first placed their games on this site and then, with the help of Michael Sahota, opened it up to the community.” Now the site contains a growing number of games, techniques, and approaches to assessing and improving every aspect of team dynamic. Each game is tagged to make it easy to search for games which meet specific needs like “retrospective”, “Kanban”, and “product backlog”.

A few years ago during a sprint retrospective we used the Mood Graph technique. To be fair, I’ve used this on and off since about 2006, but someone recently added it to TastyCupcakes. The exercise worked exactly as described by Thomas (the submitter) with our results shown in the picture below. The not-so-obvious thing that I appreciate about the Mood Graph technique is that a simple photo becomes the retrospective documentation with the discussion amongst the Team being that private conversation that serves to help bind the Team together.

And you thought I was going to talk about food.