Conference season isn't over yet. There are several great agile and software development conferences that I will be attending and covering for InfoQ in the upcoming months before the holidays start.
I chaired a session about getting into reflection mode at the Retrospective Facilitators Gathering 2016. In this session we discussed what facilitators can do to help people to look back and reflect in an agile / Scrum retrospective meeting or at other occasion where they want to learn from how they are doing.
Agile teams use product backlogs to manage their requirements. Product owners prioritize the user stories. To enable delivering products with sufficient quality agile teams need to have user stories that are ready at the start of an iteration.
I gave a talk about The Road to Agility at the 7th Agile Eastern Europe (#AgileEE) conference in Kiev, Ukraine. This was the second time that I presented at AgileEE, I was invited back by the organizers after giving a talk on Sustainable Improvement through Agile Retrospectives in 2015.
I regularly get questions on agile retrospectives, which I'm more than happy to answer. In this blog post I'll discuss the question that I got from someone who attended one of my workshops on valuable agile retrospectives. He was planning a retrospective with a new team, and wanted my advice on which exercise to use and how to facilitate the retrospective.
Five great French books on agile have bundled up on Leanpub and are now offered for a significantly reduced price. Together these books provide insight into agile retrospectives, coaching, managing requirements in agile, and programming by kids. Take a look at Livres français sur l’Agilité.
I gave a talk about Nuggets for your Continuous Improvement Journey at the Agilia 2016 conference in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and a full day workshop on Valuable Agile Retrospectives that was very well received.
I met Hugo Messer a couple of years ago, when I connected with Bridge Global who started publishing guest posts from me. We talked about working with remote teams to find out that our thoughts on this are quite similar. In this guest post Hugo explores how Scrum can help distributed software development teams.
NO and YES are two simple words, yet practice shows that professionals often have difficulties in using them. Actually it's very easy, certainly when you want to work in an agile way. Dare to say NO when you are unsure if you can do what's requested. When you say YES it means that you will deliver the product, on time with the right quality.
Do you have a question about doing agile retrospectives? Need some help on how to do them? I'm there to answer your questions. All you have to do is ask :-)
Over the years I've had some situations where I couldn't get a team to come together in a retrospective to meet and reflect on the sprint. I've seen two different kinds of reasons for this. One was that a team wasn't convinced that agile was suitable for them, so they questioned doing agile retrospectives. The other situation was that the team believed in agile and Scrum and wanted to do a retrospective, but was looking for an alternative solution where they would not have to meet physically. Something that also a dispersed team would consider when travelling isn't an option. Let's explore how you can recognize these situations and deal with them.
I recently received a question whether Product Owners should participate in agile retrospectives. An interesting discussion took off about how "it should be by the book" and "common sense" which I have summarized in the below blog post.