Dan Farino About MySpace’s Architecture
Dan Farino talks about the system architecture and the challenges faced when building a very large online community. Dan explains how a .NET product scales on hundreds of servers.
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Jun 04, 2007 11:10 AM
Retrospectives are a tool that a team can use for positive change to shift from following a process to driving their own process, becoming self-managed. In this article, Rachel Davies, a founding member of the UK's XP community, offers help for teams who have ideas for improvements but aren't sure how to get them off the ground. This article covers the steps required to run a retrospective and implement its results.Expecting magic to happen just by virtue of bringing the team together in a room to discuss recent events is unrealistic. Like any productive meeting, a retrospective needs a clear agenda and a facilitator to keep the meeting running smoothly. Without these in place, conversations are likely to be full of criticism and attributing blame. Simply getting people into a room to vent their frustrations is unlikely to resolve any problems and may even exacerbate them.Davies proposes that thoughtful facilitation can help teams fearlessly talk about past experiences without resorting to blame. Strategies include setting ground rules, using the "retrospective prime directive" and allowing team members to attend voluntarily.
The power of regular retrospectives and regular exercise is that they prevent big problems from happening so there should be no war stories or miraculous transformations! Embracing retrospectives helps a team find tune their process at a sustainable pace.Read the InfoQ article: How To: Live and Learn with Retrospectives by Rachel Davies.
Webcast: Applying lean thinking to the governance of software development
The Future of Software Delivery According to visionaries Grady Booch & Erich Gamma
Lean Software Development Governance, a whitepaper by Per Kroll and Scott Ambler
Offshore software development: Making it a success with Agile Practices
VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.
My (nurse) wife pointed out to me that a retrospective at the conclusion of a successful project should really be called a post partem because there was a birth, not a death. (And usually everyone feels like they've got the baby blues from the end of project stress.)
It's also a more positive term. Post mortem is pretty morbid sounding.
I think part of the point is that having these exercises *only* at the end of a project is a bad thing. So from an agile perspective the analogy is not a bad one. By the time you get to a 'post-mortem' it is too late to make the necessary changes needed to save the project/patient...
I think that ther is a big difference between a retrospective and post-mortem. We do our retrospective after every 2 week sprint, and they work great, we tuned our development process and had some good success stories...
Great idea! :-D
Tell that to Rosemary and her baby :)
Anyway, the trick (at least for me and Michał) is to review you process (and the iteration itself) just after the iteration. And even this way, the post-mortem still applies - after all who wants to miss the traditional blame party, when everyone goes home full of digitals from the finger pointing special moment ?
Jokes aside, (for me) usually this practice must be introduced in a covert way, to not be perceived as an 'audit' by the team - the first 'sessions' often go great after a (no so) few beers during a happy-hour....
Dan Farino talks about the system architecture and the challenges faced when building a very large online community. Dan explains how a .NET product scales on hundreds of servers.
Bernd Mathiske discusses Maxine VM, Java compatibility, swapping major VM components, research areas, Object handling, code examples, optimizing compiler, snippets, bytecode generation, JNI and JIT.
Joe Armstrong speaks on various aspects of the Erlang language, presenting its roots, how it compares with other languages and why it has become popular these days.
The java double-check singleton pattern is not thread safe and can’t be fixed. In this article, Dr. Alexey Yakubovich provides an implementation of the Singleton pattern that he claims is thread-safe.
Diana and Jim talk about patterns observed in CTOs' activity. CTOs emerge as real people caring for other people in their organization, and are put under a lot of pressure and constraints.
Cloud computing feels like a tomorrow technology. Simon Thurman shows how developers can use Biztalk to create an Internet Service Bus which can be deployed locally or in the cloud.
InfoQ takes a look at the JavaFX preview build and talks to Sun Staff Engineer Joshua Marinacci about the upcoming version 1 release expected this autumn.
Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, and Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, present an actual case of reaching hyper-productivity with a large distributed team using XP and Scrum.
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