Drop / Add / Keep / Improve

Four-Step DAKI Retrospective Helps Agile Teams Improve Performance

The Drop, Add, Keep, Improve (DAKI) retrospective is a structured format for conducting a retrospective in agile software development. The format is designed to help teams reflect on their recent work and identify specific actions to take moving forward.

In the DAKI retrospective, team members are asked to reflect on four key areas:

1. Drop: What should we stop doing that is not contributing to our success?
2. Add: What new practices or processes should we introduce to improve our performance?
3. Keep: What existing practices or processes should we continue to use because they are working well?
4. Improve: What existing practices or processes should we modify or improve to increase their effectiveness?

By addressing each of these areas, the team can gain a comprehensive understanding of their recent performance and develop specific actions to improve going forward.

Drop, Add, Keep, Improve Retrospective Summary

The DAKI retrospective format is flexible and can be adapted to fit the needs of any agile team. It encourages open and honest dialogue among team members, while providing a structured framework for collaborative problem-solving. The format is also designed to be efficient and time-effective, allowing teams to quickly identify areas for improvement and take action to address them.

This activity never fails to surface improvements and experiments. Depending on how the session goes, you can experiment with taking one action from each of the DAKI categories, or vote to take the group's top priority actions. Just don't take on too many actions at once!