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InfoQ Homepage News InfoQ Article: Reflecting on Success: Good Agile Karma

InfoQ Article: Reflecting on Success: Good Agile Karma

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When working as a team, the effects of our words and actions actively create, and re-create over time, the environment in which our teams and projects operate. Why do some projects shine, while other spiral downward? The answers are as complex as teams are different.  The tool for really answering this is the retrospective, wherein we can determine not only what went wrong... but also what went right, things we want to reinforce and continue doing. This article InfoQ article, Good Agile Karma, elaborates on an October blog entry by Gunjan Doshi, of which he said:
Agile teams crank out lot of code in short time. I have seen that if teams are not reminded they tend to slip back to their old habits. I created a list for our teams to keep their agile karma good.
Some teams use retrospectives to focus on what's broken with their process, skipping over the questions "What went well" and "What do we want to continue doing?"  The article suggests that opportunities for success may be lost when teams don't reflect on their best contributions to process.  Borrowing an idea from an ancient tradition, Gunjan Doshi and Deborah Hartmann use the idea of Good Agile Karma to look at the ways in which consistent team behaviour can enhance both project success and individual work satisfaction - and help sustain the experience, which is always a challenge. 

Agile Karma: the cosmic principle according to which the experience of project participants improves or degrades in each iteration according to their actions (or failure to act) in previous iterations.

Their idea is that teams should take the time to identify and celebrate the things they do "right" - the things that enhance Agility.

As we keep practicing Agile disciplines like pair programming, TDD, and plannning with User Stories, we build up a web of interrelated, mutually reinforcing behaviours which together yield more than the sum of their individual parts. These can have more far-reaching effects than we might at first have imagined. Once we have experienced some of these compounded benefits, the question is how do we sustain the benefits and keep improving? The tool for answering this is the retrospective, wherein we can determine not only what went wrong... but also what went right: things we want to reinforce and continue doing.
Good Agile Karma looks different for different teams, and for different players on the team.  This article simply presents some examples of Good Karma, in the eyes of the authors, and invites teams to develop their own list.

Read Good Agile Karma.

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