The Four L's is a classic exercise that you can use in your agile retrospectives. It helps your teams to look for things they Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For in their iteration, and to take actions based on their shared insight on how they are performing as a team.
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.
When you are working with an agile team where people are not co-located you still want to do valuable agile retrospectives. As gathering everybody in one location for the retrospective is not feasible, you need to take a different approach. The dispersed team questions retrospective exercise is a variant of the questions-based retrospective for teams consisting of members working from different locations, for example team members working from home or working in different offices, countries or even continents.
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.
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.
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.
Do your teams want to know how agile they are? And what could be the possible next steps for them to become more agile and lean? In an open space session about Agile Self-Assessments organized by nlScrum we discussed why self-assessments matter and how teams can self-assess their agility to become better in what they do.
Root Cause Analysis can be used in software development to build a shared understanding of a problem to determine the first or “root” causes. Knowing these causes helps to identify effective improvement actions to prevent similar problems in the future. You can also do Root Cause Analysis in agile to stop problems that have been bugging your team for too long.
The Perfection Game can be used to get feedback on a product or service that has been provided. It is also a retrospective exercise usable to discover strengths and define effective improvement actions. The perfection game gives power to the teams and helps them to self organize and become more agile.
Good coaching addresses the challenges many organizations face when adopting Agile ways of working, including Scrum implementation. Let's explore why you would need coaching and what it can accomplish, and what you can do to develop agile coaching in your organization. As an example, I will share how I have developed my coaching skills during the years.
Agile retrospectives can be used by teams to inspect and adapt the way of working. Here's an introduction to agile retrospectives, to help you to get started with them.
What can agile projects do to improve collaboration between teams, and increase their contributions in the project? Doing retrospectives of retrospectives is a way to share learnings across a project, and to solve problems that a project is facing.