Together with Luis Gonçalves I am writing a pocket book about "Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives".We value your feedback, so please let us know what you think of our initiative, our previously published blogs and which topics you would like to have covered in the pocket book?
A 1 word retrospective is a technique that helps if a team is struggling with the way they collaborate, or if there are issues which are not dealt with. All team members state in 1 word how they feel about the sprint, and a discussion is facilitated. It is an effective way for the team to discuss what is hampering them, and agree on how to deal with it and get it out of the way.
Retrospectives bring benefits to Agile teams, they help them to improve and deliver value to their customers and the company. This first article in the series Retrospective Benefits explores how you can benefit from retrospectives, by getting improvement actions that will be done by the agile team.
The book The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin is about attitude and discipline in software development. Robert explores how soft skills matter in IT, how people communicate and collaborate and develop their skills to become a professional programmer.
At the start of the 21th century I did my first agile retrospectives. I started with retrospectives to help a project to improve along the way, so that we could reap the benefits during the project, and benefits. My aim then and now: To enable teams and the whole organization to improve continuously.
The book Economics of Software Quality provides solutions to quantify Software Quality and manage software development and maintenance. It contains data usable to build a business case to improve quality, and decide upon improvements in your organization.
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!
A list of the success factors that helped organizations to get Scrum implemented and used, and to make a difference.
Having a "toolbox" of retrospectives helps you as a retrospective facilitator to deliver value to a team. You can plan a retrospective meeting, and think about the technique that you want to use, but be open to change it on the spot when needed.
To do small changes, or to get an improvement journey started in an organization, I use a short cycled "observe and change" approach, that consists of a couple of hours of observation with a 1 page feedback and change advice.
One technique often used in agile retrospectives is to ask questions to the Scrum team. It's a technique that is easy to learn, but the effectiveness depends on the questions that you ask to the team. Which Questions do you ask?
What do you think: Should the scrum master come from the team, or should it be (former) project managers?