In this third post in the series on handling impediments I'll explore what you can do to understand the impediment and underlying the problems that the team is trying to deal with. Previous posts explained why impediments matter and how you can recognize the problem.
Onlangs kreeg ik een vraag of de Product Owner aan de retrospective mag deelnemen. Er ontspon zich een interessante discussie over hoe "het moet volgens het boekje" en "gezond boerenverstand" die ik in onderstaande blog post heb samengevat.
This second post in the series on handling impediments builds on the process described in Handling Impediments: Why it Matters! I'll dive into the first step: recognizing the problem.
Agile retrospectives helpen teams om te leren. Teams passen hun werkwijze aan om beter te worden in wat ze doen. Hieronder een beschrijving van een situatie uit mijn praktijk waarin een team mbv een retrospective leerde van hun fouten en door het doen van verbeteracties soortgelijke problemen in de toekomst voorkwam.
This is the first blog post of a series on handling impediments in agile teams. It explores why being able to deal with impediments matters for agile teams and provides a basic "process" for effectively dealing with them.
Via twitter kwam in contact met Johan Roels. In zijn boek Cruciale Dialogen herken ik veel dingen vanuit mijn ervaring met continue verbetering in organisaties. Het vlindermodel wat Johan heeft gedefinieerd in zijn boek verbindt communicatie met waardering om oplossingen voor problemen te zoeken en die vervolgens effectief te implementeren.
Effective agile teams are able to decide how to do their work, and to continuously learn and improve their way of working. Team working enables them to deliver high quality software that satisfies the needs of their customers.
Continuous improvement requires that people reflect and find ways to do their work in a better way. Having diversity in agile teams makes it possible to discover and explore new ways of working, where uniform teams with identical kinds of people would aim for steadiness and don't want things to change. Let's explore how you diversity can enable continuous improvement using agile retrospectives.
When you're facing problems and feel that there's no room for improvement, the situation will only get worse. You're building up process debt, a debt that you will have to repay as soon as possible to prevent from going bankrupt. Let's explore how you can deal with process debt by taking a first step on a journey of continuous improvement to increase your agility.
In 1980 Philip Crosby wrote the book Quality is Free. In the book he explained how investing time and energy in building the right products with good quality will save money and time. Many agile teams know how important software quality is, but they need to convince their managers and other stakeholders to get there. It will help them to self-organize and do their work in a good way. Let's explore how you can sell that "quality is free" and build a business case for quality.
We can learn from failures, from our mistakes; that is something we all know. But we can also learn from things that go well. Here's an example of a team that explored how they succeeded in delivering their project on time against their expectation and used their learnings to improve, and a couple of techniques and exercises that you can use in retrospectives to learn from things that go well.
Een sterk punt van een agile aanpak is dat dat er in korte cycli, z.g. iteraties of sprints (Scrum) gewerkt wordt, en er steeds feedback momenten zijn. Het cyclisch werken met feedback zorgt ervoor dat het proces bewaakt kan worden, en informatie uit de feedback helpt om continue de agile werkwijze te verbeteren. Dit artikel beschrijft welke feedback er in agile is en hoe je die feedback effectief kunt benutten.