In this guest blog post on BenLinders.com David Horowitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Retrium, explores why you should do continuous agile retrospectives and how you can do them to establish continuous improvement.
Do you have the same person acting as a Scrum master for every iteration in your team(s)? Or do different team members take the role on turns? I'd like to hear how you do it, what works for you, and why.
The Leanpub bundle Agile Retrospectives offers great books to do amazing Agile Retrospectives. Together these books will make your Agile retrospectives rock! Teams will love to do them :-) And now you can get these books with a significant discount :-).
I sometimes hear of teams that have stopped doing retrospectives because they didn't see any improvements. When I talk with them it often turns out that they didn't have good actions coming out of the retrospectives, or that the actions weren't done and kept coming back in the retrospective. No actions leads to no improvement. Here are some suggestions on what you can do to assure that you will have actions from retrospectives that are doable and that those actions get done.
The retrospective prime directive is a sentence that is used by facilitators to establish safety in a retrospective meeting. Safety is crucial if you want people to speak up and be open, which is an important precondition to reflect and learn which is what agile retrospectives are all about. Since our book is being translated into many languages we now have translations of this unique and important statement.
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.
People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!
Retrospective Doughnuts can be used to make the adoption rate of retrospectives and the value that they deliver visible. This support organizations in using retrospectives to establish a routine feedback loop leading to continuous improvement. A guest blog post from Mukyul Vyas.
Agile definitely needs coaching. But the way that people are coached can make a huge difference, it can be done more effectively with part-time coaching. It’s not about the coaches, it’s coaching and the coachees that matters!
Here's a story of a team that had a serious problem which it didn't recognize at first. The story shows that sometimes doing nothing can be the best thing that you can do to implement lasting change in organizations.
In deze gastblog deelt Erik Philippus van ImprovemenT zijn ervaringen met diverse agile en Scrum certificeringen.
Many agile teams are doing retrospectives at the end of their iterations to reflect on their way of working and find things that can be improved. But what if teams are starting up and trying to figure out how to do their work? A futurespective exercise can help teams teams to find ways to reach their goals, agree upon their way of working and define a Definition of Done.