Books

How to Adopt Agile Retrospectives

Adopting retrospectives is an organizational change where professionals adapt their way of working, their behavior. It won't just happen, and if not properly supported it may take much time, or even fail. You have to make clear what the purpose of retrospectives, and set up a team of capable retrospective facilitators. Then start doing them with your agile teams, and reflect on how they are going. This will get retrospectives introduced and accepted by your teams, leading to continuous improvement!

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Asking why?

Another technique for Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives is "Asking Why?". "Why" is one of the most valuable question that I use in retrospectives. It gives insight in peoples behavior and their feelings and motives that drive them, helps to find root causes of problems, and reveal the strengths that people have. And helps teams to see common goals, and find ways to collaboratively reach them.

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Peopleware Summary in 15 Tweets

The book Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister has been released in a 3rd edition, and the topics addressed in it are still very important. Software development is about people: when, how and where they can work together. If you truly are concerned with people, and looking for ways to improve how you collaboratively develop and deliver software, then this book is a must read.

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Read more about the article Do Soft Skills Really Matter in IT?

Do Soft Skills Really Matter in IT?

IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lot's of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the "real work". It may be out there, but I don't see it that often. What I see are people working together to deliver software solutions that work, which help their customers in their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration are essential to make people and teams successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT!

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