I gave a well received keynote at the QCon Beijing conference, in which I explained why continuous improvement is essential to deliver value with agile. QCon Beijing was the largest QCon conference so far with over 1600 attendants.
For decades organizations are looking for the best way to do software development. Many methods have been explored and frameworks have been published to guide organizations on how to do it. Although our industry as a whole has improved, many organizations struggle. Delivering working software still seems to be hard.
Agile takes a different approach to becoming the best in software development by stating “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it”. Agile never promised to be silver bullet, it’s not a one size fits all approach and doesn’t have all the answers.
We hear from organizations that have become successful with agile, but there are also agile transformations that are not bringing the expected results. Better software development is not about implementing the the best framework or method throughout the organization to have everybody working in in the same way. What matters is that people, teams and organizations become flexible and able to adapt to the needs and situation at hand.
Continuous improvement is what makes agile work. It’s at the heart of agile. In my keynote I showed why continuous improvement matters in agile and what you can do to help your organization to really become agile.
Agile Retrospectives help teams to improve continuously
I also gave a regular talk at QCon Beijing about Valuable Agile Retrospectives.
This talk explains the “what” and “why” of retrospectives and the business value and benefits that they can bring. Examples will be given of exercises that you can use to facilitate retrospectives, supported with advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. It is based on the successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives (also available in Chinese).
Getting more value out of Agile and Lean
If your agile transformation is not delivering the expect results or if if you are doing agile and want to deliver more value to your customers and stakeholders, then join my workshop Getting More out of Agile and Lean. In this workshop you will experience agile practices for teams and stakeholders with advice on how to deploy them, and tips and tricks to become more agile and lean. It will help you to develop the right products for your business and customers, reduce your delivery time, increase the quality of your software, and create happy high performing teams.
