Martin Alaimo thinks that personal issues are rarely discussed in Scrum retrospectives. In this article, he discusses how he includes in retrospectives a special section to address personal issues. He explains how he uses retrospectives to build Scrum between the Scrum team members.
Martin starts personal retrospectives with ans exercise that will prove to the team that it will achieve better results working collaboratively. He proposes an exrecises where each person steps in front of the audience and answers the following three questions (scoring the answer on a scale of 1 to 10, and commenting briefly on each score):
* How do you judge your fulfillment of commitments to your team?
* How do you judge your relationships with your teammates?
* How do you judge your learning and growth in this project?
As soon as the person at the front finishes, only people belonging to his or her team give feedback publicly, as follows:
* How do you judge his or her relationship with you and with the rest of the team?
* What do you judge to be his or her greatest virtue?
* What aspects do you judge he or she could improve?
After this, each team member says, explicitly, which feedback made the most sense to him. Then he designs an action plan for personal improvement, in which each individual, together with the team, decides what actions to take and how to get assistance from his or her teammates. This kind of retrospective helps to develop trust.