An XP team can play Retrospective Roulette at the end of an iteration or project to assess how they’re doing. This game is played with the entire deck of eXtreme Programming Playing Cards.
Players compete to have the highest score by choosing cards from the deck and assessing how the team is doing with respect to each card. The player with the highest number of points at the end of the game wins.
This game helps teams learn about:
- what is working well (or getting better) on their project
- what needs improvement (or is getting worse) on their project
Retrospective Roulette is appropriate for:
- teams actively engaged in an XP project
- teams engaged in an XP project retrospective
Rules
After the cards are shuffled, the deck is layed face down. A player takes a card and reads its contents to the other players. The card may be a Problem card, Solution card, Value card or Joker. Here’s what the player will do for each card type:
| Card | Question | Scoring | Problem | Is this a genuine problem for your team? | If yes, decrement player's score by 1 |
|---|---|---|
| Solution | Is team already implementing this solution? | If yes, increment player's score by 1 |
| Value | Is the team practicing this value? | If yes, increment player's score by 1 |
| Joker | Is the team having fun? | If yes, increment player's score by 1 |
Each player takes a turn until all of the cards have been played or you run out of time.
Players
Retrospective Roulette is played with an entire team on a real XP project.
Time
You can play this game for set amount of time (say 30 minutes) or until you run out of cards.
Variations of Play
You can also play Retrospective Roulette in a variety of ways:
- Historical Problem Cards. Play a version of this game with all of the problem cards. The winner of the game is the player with the lowest score.
- Tell us about your variation.
Feedback
We’d love to hear your feedback about this game.
