As a retrospective facilitator it's important to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises which you can use to design a retrospective. Before having a retrospective meeting, you want to prepare yourself by considering which exercises would be most suitable. That depends on the team, the situation at hand, and on what the team would like to work on. Here are some tips for designing valuable agile retrospectives that help addressing specific situations.
Root Cause Analysis can be used in software development to build a shared understanding of a problem to determine the first or “root” causes. Knowing these causes helps to identify effective improvement actions to prevent similar problems in the future. You can also do Root Cause Analysis in agile to stop problems that have been bugging your team for too long.
Another technique for Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives is "Asking Why?". "Why" is one of the most valuable question that I use in retrospectives. It gives insight in peoples behavior and their feelings and motives that drive them, helps to find root causes of problems, and reveal the strengths that people have. And helps teams to see common goals, and find ways to collaboratively reach them.
What can agile projects do to improve collaboration between teams, and increase their contributions in the project? Doing retrospectives of retrospectives is a way to share learnings across a project, and to solve problems that a project is facing.
When you have problems that keep coming back in your sprints, you can try the five times why technique. It helps you to get to the root causes of the problems, and to define effective actions that prevent them from happening in future sprints. This is one of the retrospective technique that will be included in the Pocket Book on Agile Retrospectives, your feedback can help us to improve it!
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!
Is het wel zo erg als er een keer iets fout gaat? Als het fout kan gaan, laat dat dan maar zo snel mogelijk gebeuren, want dan kun je er van leren. Creëer een cultuur waarin falen mag, samen op weg naar minder fouten!
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.
Wat is Lean, en hoe kun je daarmee sneller software ontwikkelen, met hogere kwaliteit tegen lagere kosten? Een overzicht van de principes van Lean, en de toepassing met een praktijkervaring: Minder verspilling door het gebruik van Agile.
What is your most important Business Reason to do Root Cause Analysis for software development / maintenance? Please vote at http://linkd.in/nJchM8.
Na een evaluatie of audit weten we wat onze zwakke punten zijn. "Die moeten we gaan veranderen" is de aanpak die dan vaak gevolgd wordt. Herkenbaar voor velen, maar we zien ook dat het niet altijd werkt. Kan dat niet anders? Ja, door te veranderen vanuit je sterktes. Een techniek die daarbij helpt is "Oplossingsgericht Werken".
The serie on “What Drives Quality” continues. Previously covering Requirements Quality, Architecture and Design Quality and Coding Quality, this post covers Testing. Understanding what drives quality enables you to take action before problems actually occur, thus saving time and money.