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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives

    Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.

  • Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators

    Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.

  • How to Prepare an Agile Business Game

    To make playing games "interesting" from the business owner's perspective, we need to ensure that they are aligned with the business needs. There are four steps in preparing a game: exploring the context, knowing your target group, defining the focus, and deciding how to facilitate it.

  • Facilitating Team Health Assessments

    Teams can do health assessments to explore and discuss their team’s health and happiness. It’s good to let teams create their own health check, understanding what healthy looks like for the team in question. As facilitators, we can help teams decide where and how to improve.

  • Applying Cynefin in Agile Retrospective

    Sense-making can prevent teams from jumping to the first solution that comes to mind. Cynefin helps teams decide what to do in their retrospective after informed sense-making. Facilitators can use Cynefin to enhance transitions from gathering data to generating insights in retrospectives.

  • Meetings in a Time of Separation

    Having many people in virtual meetings can lead to people who only partly attend and become disengaged. We should question who should be attending the meeting and make information from the meeting available for those who decide not to attend to decrease meeting FOMO.

  • Using a Team Game for Richer Retrospectives

    Games can bring freshness to retrospectives and enable rich discussions about how things are going. Patterns emerging from the discussions provide insight into the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Considerate coaching or facilitation can allow everyone to contribute.

  • Facilitating Threat Modelling Remotely

    ThoughtWorks' Jim Gumbley recently published a guide to Threat Modelling on Martinfowler.com with a template for facilitating remote and onsite sessions. He makes a case for continuous threat modelling within each iteration, alongside business stake-holders. Derek Handova has also written about removing friction from security through automation and a greater security focus in the SDLC.

  • Using Lessons Learned as a Dungeon Master on Roleplaying and Games in Agile Coaching

    Guillaume Duquesnay uses his experience with games and roleplaying in his work as an agile coach. At the Agile Tour Brussels he talked about leadership, facilitation and management styles where no authority was involved. InfoQ interviewed Guillaume on his coaching, facilitation and leadership skills, and asked him if playing games gives happiness and fun to people, and make them more productive?

  • Using Retrospectives for Agile Adoption

    To become more flexible, durable and increase organizational effectiveness, retrospectives can be used in adopting agile. Some experiences stories and examples of how teams use retrospectives as a sustainable and adaptable solution for agile adoption, to implement continuous improvement with them.

  • Agile Usability

    Jakob Nielsen, usability guru and author of Usability Engineering, raises the concern that Agile methods are a threat to traditional approaches to designing usability. He goes on to propose solutions so that usability designers can work together in the Agile world. In addition Alistair Cockburn, while generally supporting Jakob, takes issue with a few of his points.

  • Overcoming Resistance to Change

    Any change whether an Agile implementation or re-arranging the office furniture is going to encounter some resistance. The real question is how we react when that happens. Dave Nicolette and Lasse Koskela's workshop - was designed too help us understand where resistance comes from and how to handle it.

  • Retrospective Failures and How to Avoid Them

    What are the typical problems that Retrospectives suffer from? What do we do to avoid them?

  • Interview with Joseph Pelrine: Agile Works. But HOW?

    Joseph Pelrine has come full circle: from university studies in Psychology, journeying through SmallTalk, XP and Scrum, and now back to broader questions: Why and how does Agile work? In this interview, Joseph talked about Complexity Science, and how story-telling, "sense-making," network analysis and speed-dating's gut-feel approach may prove more useful than our old toolkits for managing teams.

  • InfoQ Presentation: Jean Tabaka on Surviving Meeting Burnout

    Teams moving to an Agile approach may feel irritated as they move from command-and-control to a collaborative culture - which can start to look like non-stop meetings, starting first thing every Monday morning. In this InfoQ exclusive presentation, recorded at Agile2007, Agile coach Jean Tabaka shared her experiences working with teams, offering guidance on how to alleviate meeting burnout.

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