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Agile Performance Reviews

Why go an entire year before receiving feedback? Nothing else in the Agile world waits a year, why would feedback? Struggling to make feedback objective? Perhaps objectivity is the wrong goal perhaps reviews should be subjective. Ryan Hagan offers his approach to doing performance reviews with an Agile Team.

Ryan Hagan
on Nov 09, 2012
Interview and Book Review : The Retrospective Handbook

Patrick Kua has recently published The Retrospective Handbook which provides practical advice on how to make retrospectives much more effective. In this book Patrick draws upon his 8 years of valuable experience with retrospectives in real agile teams.

Anand Vishwanath
on Sep 17, 2012
The Agile Project Manager — Voilà: The Great Reveal

Certified Scrum Master training tells us we must conduct Reviews (aka Demo's) at the end of every Sprint. Rarely do we get guidance on how to have a great Sprint Review. Bob Galen has experienced the bad "Demos" that were only Powerpoint and helped coach them to the level where stakeholders clamoured to attend.

Robert Galen
on Jun 11, 2012
Dialogue Sheets: A new tool for retrospectives

Dialogue sheets allow teams to hold facilitator-less retrospectives. They promote self-organization and encourage everyone to speak in the exercise. This results in great levels of participation in and higher energy levels in teams. The sheet itself is A1 in size, 8 times larger than a regular sheet, pre printed with instructions and questions to motivation discussion.

Allan Kelly
on Jan 03, 2012
The Retrospective Practice as a Vehicle for Leading Conceptual Change

This paper tells how we coached the adaption process of agile software development in a specific company, with a focus on one mechanism – one-hour retrospectives – we employ to guide team members realize the needed change and let them lead it. From our perspective, the stage in which team members start facilitating the retrospective sessions by themselves is a landmark of success.

Yael Dubinsky Orit Hazzan
on Jun 14, 2011
Book Excerpt: Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins

Very little in our education or experience properly prepares a ScrumMaster or project manager for the role of agile coach. This leaves most wondering, "What is my role in a self-organized team? How do I help the team yet stay hands-off?" This chapter, excerpted from the book Coaching Agile Teams, shows you how to activate the journey toward high performance in both provocative and practical ways.

Lyssa Adkins
on Jun 15, 2010
An Introduction to Lean Thinking for Software

For Agile developers only familiar with Scrum or XP, it may be unclear how Lean relates to what they do. This article introduces Lean Thinking and how it enhances software development. Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China identified the biggest obstacle to Lean or Agile as the mind-set developed during the period of large-scale manufacturing.

Jacky Li
on Jun 23, 2008
The Three M's - The Lean Triad

The discussion of applying lean principles to software development has largely focused on identifying and eliminating waste (in Japanese: muda). Lean Thinking equally aims to remove overburden (muri) and unnecessary variation (mura). Roman Pichler discusses the relationship of the "three M's" and proposes to eliminate overburden as the first step toward a leaner process.

Roman Pichler
on Feb 27, 2008
Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive

The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is a practice used by many teams as part of their continuous improvement cycle. As outlined in Norm Kerth's book, it is intended to foster the deep learning that is the heart of a retrospective. This article is an enlightening conversation, captured by Linda Rising, between senior practitioners on the benefits and the challenges of using this practice.

Linda Rising
on Feb 14, 2008
Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

In this InfoQ article Kenji Hiranabe applies lessons learned while working with Japanese manufacturers. While many Agile teams are optimizing only a portion of the value stream, Hiranabe proposes a simple way to adapt lessons from Lean Manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking system to make process visible to more of the organization, for better communication and process improvement.

Kenji Hiranabe
on Jan 14, 2008
The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development

When Agile teams get stuck in the just-average Norming stage, rather than continuting to the exciting, high Performing stage of teamwork, sometimes they're suffering from an invisible "learning bottleneck" that stunts team performance. Agile practices require us to take time to reflect and learn - and a team that learns quickly succeeds.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss Amr Elssamadisy
on Aug 14, 2007
Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem

Can refactoring and unit testing really create robust “working software” that survives the real world? In this story adapted from his book Release It! Michael Nygard contends that "abstractions leak": we need to attend to architecture, even in Agile projects, to guard ourselves against the 5AM failures that occur when foundational abstractions misbehave.

Michael Nygard
on Jun 25, 2007

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