Improve Software Quality with Retrospectives
Agile retrospectives can be used to investigate quality issues or to agree upon actions that can improve the quality of the software that is delivered.
What Drives Quality featured on InfoQ
I've been interviewed on InfoQ about the release of my new book What Drives Quality. Book is available on Amazon, Leanpub, my webshop, and major bookstores.
Published: What Drives Quality
My 2nd book What Drives Quality has been officially released today (September 30). It is now available on Amazon and all other major bookstores.
What Drives Quality available for pre-order
My 2nd book What Drives Quality is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Leanpub, and my webshop. The book will be released end of September.
Podcast on Continuous Improvement in Agile
I'm honored to have been interviewed by Tom Cagley for his Software Process and Measurement Cast (SPaMCAST). Tom and I talked about the need for continuous improvement and how agile teams can develop skills and practices to recognize and deal with impediments.
Handling impediments: Understanding Problems
In this third post in the series on handling impediments I'll explore what you can do to understand the impediment and underlying the problems that the team is trying to deal with. Previous posts explained why impediments matter and how you can recognize the problem.
Handling Impediments: Recognizing the Problem
This second post in the series on handling impediments builds on the process described in Handling Impediments: Why it Matters! I'll dive into the first step: recognizing the problem.
Feedback en Continue Verbetering
Een sterk punt van een agile aanpak is dat dat er in korte cycli, z.g. iteraties of sprints (Scrum) gewerkt wordt, en er steeds feedback momenten zijn. Het cyclisch werken met feedback zorgt ervoor dat het proces bewaakt kan worden, en informatie uit de feedback helpt om continue de agile werkwijze te verbeteren. Dit artikel beschrijft welke feedback er in agile is en hoe je die feedback effectief kunt benutten.
Getting Retrospective Actions Done
I sometimes hear of teams that have stopped doing retrospectives because they didn't see any improvements. When I talk with them it often turns out that they didn't have good actions coming out of the retrospectives, or that the actions weren't done and kept coming back in the retrospective. No actions leads to no improvement. Here are some suggestions on what you can do to assure that you will have actions from retrospectives that are doable and that those actions get done.
What if we fail?
People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!
Guest blog: Classifying Retrospectives to get the best of it
Retrospective is a special time dedicated to analyse the strength and weakness of the teamwork process. There is already some well known tools used to animate this meeting and we tend to use often the same kind of exercise, which can lead to demotivation among the team members and to the feeling of not being able to improve anything anymore. We need to go back to the initial goal of the retrospective : getting better together, by using the collective intelligence and by ensuring the involvement of every team member as much in the creative process as in its application.
Spice up your Agile Retrospectives
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.