Doing a retrospective when you can’t get the team to meet?

Over the years I've had some situations where I couldn't get a team to come together in a retrospective to meet and reflect on the sprint. I've seen two different kinds of reasons for this. One was that a team wasn't convinced that agile was suitable for them, so they questioned doing agile retrospectives. The other situation was that the team believed in agile and Scrum and wanted to do a retrospective, but was looking for an alternative solution where they would not have to meet physically. Something that also a dispersed team would consider when travelling isn't an option. Let's explore how you can recognize these situations and deal with them.

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Should you measure defects?

Regularly I get questions if you can measure defects and if you should measure them. The short answer is: You can measure them, and it can have value to do so, but only if you take action. Quality matters, and defects can provide you with valuable information about the quality of your product, but measuring alone doesn't improve quality. You need to dive deeper to have a good understanding and then act upon that.

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Why Scrum masters shouldn’t be the one solving all impediments

Who should be handling and solving impediments? Should it be the Scrum master? The team as a whole! Their agile coach? I prefer that team members recognize and solve impediments themselves. For most of them they don't need a Scrum master or coach. So if they see a problem, I expect team members to take action and solve it.

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Continuous Improvement Matters in Agile

I gave a well received keynote about Continuous Improvement in Agile at 1st conference in Melbourne, Australia. In this talk I explained the need for continuous improvement when adopting agile ways of working, explored how continuous improvement is engrained in agile, and what you can do to increase the agility of your teams and the organization as a whole.

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