I regularly get questions on agile retrospectives, which I'm more than happy to answer. In this blog post I'll discuss the question that I got from someone who attended one of my workshops on valuable agile retrospectives. He was planning a retrospective with a new team, and wanted my advice on which exercise to use and how to facilitate the retrospective.
In Agile retrospectives gebruik je oefeningen waarmee je als team kunt verbeteren. Het boek Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives bevat 13 oefeningen die je in retrospectives kunt toepassen. Deze blog post beschrijft een nieuwe retrospective oefening die gebruikt kan worden om de kwaliteiten van (Scrum) teams zichtbaar te maken, ze te bespreken en vervolgens te kijken hoe je ze kunt benutten.
I gave a talk about Nuggets for your Continuous Improvement Journey at the Agilia 2016 conference in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and a full day workshop on Valuable Agile Retrospectives that was very well received.
Do you have a question about doing agile retrospectives? Need some help on how to do them? I'm there to answer your questions. All you have to do is ask :-)
Agile teams gebruiken retrospectives om hun manier van werken te reflecteren en te verbeteren. Veel Scrum teams sluiten iedere iteratie af met een retrospective. Teams die Kanban gebruiken doen veelal wekelijks een retrospective of doen zo vaak als nodig is een mini-retrospective om van een probleem te leren en in kleine stapjes te verbeteren. Hoe vaak doen jouw teams agile retrospectives?
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.
I recently received a question whether Product Owners should participate in agile retrospectives. An interesting discussion took off about how "it should be by the book" and "common sense" which I have summarized in the below blog post.
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.
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.
Two great books on agile retrospectives are now available in the book bundle rétrospectives agiles on Leanpub: Tirer profit des rétrospectives agiles by Luis Gonçalves and Ben Linders and Donnez un coup de fouet à vos Rétrospectives Agile by Alexey Krivitsky.
Als een organisatie besluit om agile in te voeren dan wordt er vaak ook gesproken over doelen. Mijn ervaring is dat agile als doel stellen niet werkt, agile is een middel dat kan helpen om effectiever te worden en daarmee dichter bij je doel te komen. Goed omgaan met doelen speelt wel een belangrijke rol bij het behalen van succes en resultaten met agile. Doelen en agile, hoe werkt dat? Hier zijn mijn tips.
I will be giving two workshops on Agile Retrospectives in Kiev early April, in connection with a talk at the 7th Agile Eastern Europe (#AgileEE) conference.