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.
Agile retrospectives zijn een geweldige manier om continu je werkwijze te verbeteren. Ze helpen verbeteracties te vinden die er toe doen en ze ook daadwerkelijk uit te voeren. Ze ondersteunen teams om continu te leren en te verbeteren. In een retrospective gebruik je oefeningen waarmee teams inzicht krijgen in wat er speelt en verbeteracties te definiëren. Deze blog beschrijft 2 oefeningen: De zeilboot en de 1-woord Retrospective.
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.
Op 5 juni 2014 is het boek Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives gepubliceerd, het 1e Nederlandstalige boek met oefeningen voor Retrospectives. Je kunt de Nederlandse uitgave downloaden via Leanpub en Amazon.nl. Het Nederlandstalige boek is ook te koop op benlinders.com als Paperback en op bol.com (paperback/ebook).
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.
Binnen Agile en Lean software ontwikkeling speelt dienend leiderschap een belangrijke rol. Zelf-organiserende teams kennen een scrum master die als een dienend leider het team begeleidt en ondersteund. Vanuit deze achtergrond heb ik het boek Dienend Leiderschap van Henk Jan Kamsteeg gelezen. Het heeft mij enkele nieuwe inzichten gegeven en gestimuleerd om mij verder te verdiepen in het onderwerp.
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.
Een agile manier van werken is prima geschikt voor het ontwikkelen van software. Maar dat is niet het enige wat je met agile kunt doen. Scrum kun je ook prima toepassen in het onderwijs. eduScrum is een leuke en effectieve manier om agile les te geven met zelf-organiserende teams van leerlingen. Als partner en vriend van eduScrum mocht ik een kijkje in de keuken nemen bij het Ashram college in Alphen aan den Rijn en sprak ik met leerlingen over hun ervaringen met eduScrum.
There are organizations which think that Agile or Scrum can be the solution to solve all IT problems that they have. Senior management has decided that their whole organization has to become agile. To realize that they demand that all existing (waterfall) processes will be replaced by Agile processes. Even if they succeed to do that (which is often not the case) they are usually not getting the expected business benefits out of Agile. Replacing processes doesn't make an organization Agile.