Rules for Better Retrospectives
James Carr recently published a list of five rules to help improve the effectiveness of retrospectives. The rules are based on his experiences in hundreds of retrospectives, both successful and not.
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Chris Sims
Chris Sims helps software development teams improve their productivity and happiness. His approach combines experiential training, coaching, and even direct technical contribution. Chris is the founder of Agile Learning Labs. In addition, he is chair of the IEEE Technical Management Council of Silicon Valley, and is on the board of BayAPLN, the Bay Area chapter of the Agile Project Leadership Network. Chris is a certified scrum master and practitioner, who has been leading successful agile software projects since the turn of the century. He has made a living in roles such as: Scrum Master, Product Owner, Engineering Manager, Project Manager, C++ Developer, Musician, and Auto Mechanic.
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News by Chris Sims
Second Agile Coach Camp Announced
March 19 - 21, agile coaches will gather in Durham, North Carolina to share, learn, and improve their skills. Registration for this event costs no money, but each participant must write a position paper in order to qualify. The event will have no preset agenda of sessions. Instead, the Open Space approach will be used, and participants will create the agenda at the event itself.
Estimating Business Value
The traditional agile approach to prioritization is that user stories of higher business value should be implemented before ones of lower business value. The concept is simple, but implementing it well relies on having a mechanism to assess business value. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe has recently described an approach to defining business value, called "Business Value Modeling", which may help.
Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests
Automated tests that are brittle and expensive to maintain have led to companies abandoning test automation initiatives, according to Dale Emery. In a newly published paper, Dale shares some practical ways to avoid common problems with test automation. He starts with some typical automation code and evolves in ways that make it more robust, and less expensive to maintain.
Improving Distributed Retrospectives
Many consider the retrospective to be an agile team’s most powerful tool for continuous improvement. The retrospective captures learning and insights while experiences are fresh, and the lessons are immediately applied to the teams on-going work. A discussion on the Retrospectives Yahoo Group examined how to adapt a retrospective to work across multiple sites, with a distributed team.
Pomodoro - An Agile Approach to Time Management
A personal time management approach known as "The Pomodoro Technique" is becoming quite popular with agile practitioners. Pomodoro includes a number of practices similar to those used by an agile team: time-boxing, frequent opportunities to inspect-and-adapt, estimation, a preference for low-tech tools, and an emphasis on maintaining a sustainable pace.
PMI Launches Agile Community of Practice at Agile2009
The Project Management Institute (PMI) officially launched their Agile Community of Practice at the Agile2009 conference. The group's stated mission is: "To equip PMI Members with Agile skills and knowledge" Mike Griffiths has been credited with getting things moving when he issued a challenge at Agile 2007 that PMI form an Agile Specific Interest Group.
'State of Agile' Survey Open
The fourth annual 'State of Agile' survey is open for public participation. The 6-page survey takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete and participants remain anonymous. Over the past 3 years the survey, sponsored by VersionOne, has gauged how widely agile practices have been adopted, as well as the results obtained.
