In the mini-workshop Experience new exercises to spice up your agile retrospective #RetroValue that I gave at Lean Kanban France teams experienced three different retrospectives exercises. They learned how retrospectives can help them to gain deeper insight in their situation and came up with actions to deal with problems and improve their performance.
There is a danger with retrospectives that teams will end up just going through the motions and not use the valuable material to identify whether the actions agreed at the end of the retrospective are actually making an impact on the team’s capability to improve. Furthermore, the chances are that in a multi-team environment, there are common themes raised that if highlighted early, can aid a new team when starting up – learn from others misfortune! Following the Agile philosophy of transparency, here at the UK Ministry of Justice we have been using Wordles to really get the key messages across in a clear manner.
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.
When an organization is experiencing quality problems with their products, agile software development often isn't the first solution that comes up in people's minds. Often I see people trying to address them using classical waterfall based approaches, only to find out that it will make problems even worse. I recommend agile, not only to deliver working software faster but also with the right quality. This posts shows how empowering the team helps to increase the quality of product.
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.
Op 1 september organiseren Agile Holland en het Agile Consortium de meetup Real Agile Delivers Real Value . Tijdens dit event worden twee boeken gepresenteerd: This is Agile door auteur Sander Hoogendoorn en Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives door auteur Ben Linders. Het 1e Nederlandstalige boek over Agile Retrospectives kun je nu met korting kopen!
This is a story of how I coach people by "just being there". It describes how I worked with a customers to improve the interworking and communication between people working in different departments.
The book Management 3.0 workout by Jurgen Appelo provides many practices, games and tools that enable organizations to improve the way they manage themselves and how they treat and support their employees. Where Management 3.0 already provides the backgrounds and insights on better management, this new book gives concrete examples on how to implement it.
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.