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Architecture & Design

Architectural Retrospectives: the Key to Getting Better at Architecting

The purpose of an architectural retrospective is to use experience to help the development team improve their architecting skills and their way of working as they make architectural decisions. This is different than traditional architecture reviews which are focused on improving the architecture.

Pierre Pureur Kurt Bittner
on Aug 05, 2024
Culture & Methods

[R]Evolutionize Your Retrospectives with Active Sensemaking

High-quality retrospecting involves embracing unique individual experiences, acknowledging human limitations and biases, and sharing context-rich anecdotes through storytelling within and beyond team boundaries. This article explores how Active Sensemaking can prevent tension or apathy and foster a more productive and harmonious team environment.

Ajay Reddy
on May 18, 2023
Culture & Methods

Embracing Agile Values as a Tech and People Lead

Having worked as a software developer, the agile community has been a great source of inspiration to me to find better ways of working. In my first leadership role, I incorporated the agile mindset which helped me to get everyone working towards a joint goal: refactoring an inherited codebase for scalability, while enabling cross functional teams to work as autonomously as possible.

Milena-Mercedes May
on Feb 10, 2022
Culture & Methods

Inspect & Adapt – Digging into Our Foundations of Agility

Inspecting and adapting are fundamentals in agile practices. Yet, there are wide interpretations of how either is done well. It is a matter of our heart and soul – but the answer lies between our ears. In this article, we invite you to dip your toe into the deep waters of the internal inspect & adapt mechanisms. This article can be summarised in four words: Think. And think again.

Sven Ihnken
on May 31, 2021
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Retrospectives Antipatterns

Using the familiar “patterns” approach, the book Retrospectives Antipatterns by Aino Vonge Corry describes unfortunate situations that can sometimes happen in retrospectives. For each situation, described as an antipattern, it also provides solutions for dealing with the situation; this can be a way to solve the problem directly or avoid similar problems in future retrospectives.

Ben Linders Aino Vonge Corry
on Dec 25, 2020
Culture & Methods

Changes in the 2020 Scrum Guide: Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland

The Scrum Guide has been updated to make it less prescriptive, using simpler language to address a wider audience. These changes have been done to make Scrum a “lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems”. An interview with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about the changes to the guide.

Ben Linders Ken Schwaber Jeff Sutherland
on Dec 24, 2020
Culture & Methods

Dealing with Remote Team Challenges

Remote working provides challenges such as providing equitable access, ensuring adequate resources and tooling, addressing social isolation and issues of trust. Remote-first and truly asynchronous teams tend to consistently perform better. In the future, organisations will continue to have remote on their agenda. Fully realising the benefits of remote teams requires trust building and intent.

Ben Linders Jeremy Lu
on Dec 09, 2020
Culture & Methods

Kick-off Your Transformation by Imagining It Had Failed

Large scale change initiatives have a worryingly high failure rate, the chief reason for which is that serious risks are not identified early. One way to create the safety needed for everyone to speak openly about the risks they see is by running a pre-mortem. In a pre-mortem, we assume that the transformation had already failed and walk backward from there to investigate what led to the failure.

Ayman Idris
on Nov 27, 2020
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book- Problem? What Problem? with Ben Linders

Ben Linders has written a new book focused on helping teams and individuals identify and address impediments. Titled Problem? What Problem? The book presents ideas and experience around problem-solving approaches using an agile mindset and principles to help teams rapidly overcome challenges and use impediments as opportunities to learn and adapt.

Shane Hastie Ben Linders
on Sep 24, 2020
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Retrospectives for Everyone

The book Retrospectives for Everyone by Madhavi Ledalla explains how metaphors can be used to foster reflection and result in actions in agile retrospectives. The book provides examples of metaphors that can for instance be used to nurture teamwork, manage change, focus on objectives and personal reflection, and also provides recommendations for facilitating retrospectives beyond a single team.

Ben Linders Madhavi Ledalla
on Aug 30, 2020
Culture & Methods

Retrospectives for Management Teams

Engaging top management in a recurring retrospective approach can result in long-term value in organizations. Retrospectives can help management teams to explore how they collaborate and cooperate. They can find out whether they should change something and decide on action points that propel the team forward and make them more effective.

Ben Linders Kamil Puk
on Aug 05, 2020
Culture & Methods

Ideas for Remote Retrospectives that Engage

Retrospectives have been shown to be an important tool for teams to improve their ways of working and increase collaboration. In person, retrospectives are well understood with many approaches and techniques. This article looks at how to carry the practice across when working remotely.

Shane Hastie Charlotte Hinton Colin Basterfield Gillian Hemphill Margaret Clark
on Apr 27, 2020