The aim of an agile retrospective is to define actions for the next iteration that will improve the way of working and help teams to deliver more value to their customers. This retrospective exercise can be used within agile frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, XP or Kanban to have teams agree upon the vital few improvement actions that they will do.
When an organization is experiencing quality problems with their products, agile software development often isn't the first solution that comes up in people's minds. Often I see people trying to address them using classical waterfall based approaches, only to find out that it will make problems even worse. I recommend agile, not only to deliver working software faster but also with the right quality. This posts shows how empowering the team helps to increase the quality of product.
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve to become better in what they do. As they are a learning experience for the team the atmosphere in a retrospective meeting is usually positive. But when there have been major problems in an iteration, maybe even conflicts between team members, then team morale can be low and negativism can occur in the retrospective meeting. This is the story of how a reader of our book on Valuable Agile Retrospectives dealt with negative issues in his retrospective.
This is a story of how I coach people by "just being there". It describes how I worked with a customers to improve the interworking and communication between people working in different departments.
The book Management 3.0 workout by Jurgen Appelo provides many practices, games and tools that enable organizations to improve the way they manage themselves and how they treat and support their employees. Where Management 3.0 already provides the backgrounds and insights on better management, this new book gives concrete examples on how to implement it.
I'm proud to annouce that the second edition of our successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives has been released. This edition is available in print via Amazon and Lulu and can be downloaded as eBook from InfoQ and Leanpub. It has also been translated into Dutch and published as Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives.
To deliver high-quality products to customers, agile quality practices have to engrained throughout development. It all starts with ensuring the quality of the requirements.
Change is often hard. But it is also important and much needed. That is why agile software development suggest to frequently inspect and adapt and promotes the usage of retrospectives to continuously improve the things that teams do. Retrospectives help teams to make changes that stick in the organization, leading to sustainable improvement.
Organizations want to have insight in the values that Agile can bring to them. They want to know if and how Agile can help to satisfy customer needs more quickly, and what they can do to increase productivity and reduce development and operations costs. It is important to know the value that Agile can deliver and to be able to measure it. At the event Impact and Value of Agile, organized by the Agile Consortium, I presented the State of Affairs in Agile Value creation.
In December 2013 we published Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: a pocket book full of Retrospective Exercises. More than 1000 readers have downloaded this book in the first five months after publication from Leanpub and many more have downloaded it from InfoQ: there are 5000++ readers worldwide of our book on Valuable Agile Retrospectives. A big thanks to all of our readers!
The key Scrum ceremony that helps the team reflect on its behaviour is the retrospective. In my view, this is not any new concept or jargon the team needs to master -- but yes, in reality it sometimes becomes challenging to keep the momentum lively at all times! Let us look at the reasons why this happens and discuss a few ideas for making these meetings effective.
As a retrospective facilitator it's important to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises which you can use to design a retrospective. Before having a retrospective meeting, you want to prepare yourself by considering which exercises would be most suitable. That depends on the team, the situation at hand, and on what the team would like to work on. Here are some tips for designing valuable agile retrospectives that help addressing specific situations.