Author: Ben Linders

This author has written 391 articles

Software Quality is Free

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.

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Learning from Things that Go Well

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.

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Read more about the article Feedback en Continue Verbetering

Feedback en Continue Verbetering

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.

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Using Strength-based Questions in Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives help teams to learn from how they are doing and find ways to improve themselves. In stead of learning from what went wrong, from problems, mistakes or failures, teams can also learn from things that went well, by asking strength-based questions in their retrospectives. Such questions will help them to use their existing skills and experience to become great in doing things that they are already good at.

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Read more about the article Exploring Strengths with Core Qualities

Exploring Strengths with Core Qualities

Teams can improve their way of working by exploring their strengths using a core qualities exercise in their agile retrospectives. The exercise described in this blog post, which is based on ideas from positive psychology and Solution Focused, helps team to become even better in things that they are great at. It enables them to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.

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Delivering Training in an Agile Way

When a client asks for a training session, most often the full content of the training is discussed and defined up front. With one client that wanted a week of training I took a different approach. The client an I used a backlog to prioritize training sessions and workshops. We only planned the first days, and reflected and adjusted the training every day of the week. This is a story of how I collaborated with a client in an agile way to ensure that they would get the biggest possible benefit out of a training week that I delivered to them.

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Bottom up je agility verhogen

Agile verandertrajecten worden veelal top down uitgevoerd in organisaties. Zulke trajecten kosten veel tijd en energie van het management en de medewerkers, duren lang, en leveren vaak niet de verwachte voordelen op: de organisatie wordt er niet echt agile van. Een bottom up aanpak, gedreven vanuit de medewerkers, kan ervoor zorgen dat een organisatie sneller en blijvend hun agility verhoogt.

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Why dedicated Full-Time Scrum masters are hard to implement – and what’s the alternative

More and more organizations are implementing agile with Scrum. They define teams and assign Scrum masters to the teams to start working agile and become self-organized. Although agile looks easy, to implement the Scrum master role often turns out to be problematic. Let's discuss what makes it so difficult to work with full-time Scrum masters and explore the alternative of having technical people taking the Scrum master role.

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