Top 5 trending retrospective activities

We recently released a set of new retrospective activities. These activities enhance the available list, offering more options for this vital scrum meeting.

We took this opportunity to check out the usage of all the activities offered in Team O’clock. So we checked years-long data about the retrospective activities that teams prefer to perform their reflection.

Retrospective activities data & analysis

In Team O’clock, you have access to 19 preset activities to choose from, or you can create a custom activity for your team.

To see the most used activities, we gathered data for all the presets for the last 12 months, from April 2021 to April 2022 so far. Since we introduced new activities in this period, not all activities were used each month.

What we’ve noticed from the high-level analysis, is that there starting in 2022 more teams performed retrospective sessions! On average 15% more retrospectives are conducted each month of 2022. We aggregated the data mid April 2022, and in April there were as many retrospectives conducted as in the whole of December 2021.

Digging deeper into the data, we checked the retrospective activities that teams prefer to do their reflection meetings on. These are the top 5 activities in terms of usage:

• Start, Stop, Continue: was used in 57% of the retrospectives conducted over the last 12 months

• Went well, didn’t go well: was used in 19% of the retrospectives

• Mad, Sad, Glad: was used in 7% of the retrospectives within the period

• The 4Ls: had a similar usage of 7% for the designated period

• The three little pigs: is the last in the list with 2.7% of the retrospectives in the last 12 months.

Retrospective activity usage breakdown by volumes of sessions per activity

The activity of Start, Stop, Continue is the preset activity when starting a retrospective in Team O’clock and it seems that teams feel comfortable using, it without messing around with the available options.

Another interesting observation is that 4 out of 5 activities in the list focus on a pragmatic approach to the retrospective rather than a more playful one.

Top 5 retrospective activities usage in the last 12 months

Checking the top 5 retrospective activities used in time, we see that Start, Stop Continue is trending down in usage. While two of the activities in the top 5 are trending upward, they cannot cover the losses of Start, Stop, Continue activity. Essentially teams are using more of the other activities offered, which are not in the top 5, adding diversity to their retrospectives.

This means that the teams performing retrospectives are trying out new activities to keep the engagement high. Checking data from April 2022 — where we introduced 8 more activities — we see some new trending activities like:

• Marie Kondo: this is a playful activity for team introspection, based on the KonMari philosophy.

• Mountain Hiking: using the metaphor of climbing a mountain to help the team zoom out and see the bigger picture.

• Winning streak: to help the team celebrate wins and acknowledge positive traits.

• Hero’s journey: an adventurous and epic activity to boost the team’s morale.

The road to continuous team growth

The above analysis reveals some very promising directions for teams using scrum methodologies. The retrospective plays an enormous role in ‘agile’ (and not ‘Agile’), as it requires real effort and will to grow from the teams performing it.

First of all, we see more teams performing retrospectives, thus embracing growth in their ceremonies.

Finally, we see a slow trend of teams stirring away from the default activities and exploring more intriguing activities, spicing up their reflection meetings and digging deeper for improvement.