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Dialogue Sheets Revisited

Last year Allan Kelly wrote an InfoQ article about a tool for retrospectives - Dialogue Sheets. A year and over 2000 downloads later he looks at how they are being used and ways they have been adapted in the wild.

Allan Kelly
on Apr 22, 2013
DevOps @ Nokia Entertainment

DevOps@Nokia Entertainment is the first article of the “DevOps War Stories” series. Each month we hear what DevOps brings to a different organisation, we learn what worked and what didn’t, and chart the challenges faced during adoption.

John Clapham
on Jan 31, 2013
Interview and Book Review: Essential Scrum

Essential Scrum by Kenny Rubin is a book about getting more out of Scrum. It’s an introduction to Scrum and its values, principles and practices, and a source of inspiration on how to apply it.

Ben Linders
on Dec 04, 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
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.

Orit Hazzan Yael Dubinsky
on Jun 14, 2011
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
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
Culture & Methods

How To: Live and Learn with Retrospectives

Traditional SDLCs say how interactions within a team and between teams should happen; a prescription that doesn't always fit or isn't followed consistently. Rachel Davies explains how retrospectives allow teams to improve their processes by reviewing past events and brainstorming new ideas, and shows how to facilitate a retrospective for your team.

Rachel Davies
on May 31, 2007
Good Agile Karma

Agile relies heavily on discipline, rather than genius. We're told that average teams, even in the early stages, can achieve dramatic performance improvement if they are disciplined. As we do these things, the effects of our words and actions actively create, and re-create over time, the environment in which our teams and projects operate - for good or ill.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss Gunjan Doshi
on Jan 25, 2007
Book Excerpt: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. Traditionally held at the end of a project, they're actually too late to help - no wonder we call them "post-mortems". Agile teams need retrospectives that are iterative and incremental, to find problems and design solutions to help teams improve early on, when improvement yields the most benefit.

Diana Larsen Esther Derby
on Aug 21, 2006
Book Review: Collaboration Explained: Facilitation skills for software project leaders

David Spann, himself an experienced facilitator, provides an insightful review of "Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders" by Jean Tabaka. Jean, an experienced teacher, consultant and coach, offers techniques to enhance group effectiveness, provides some templates to assure their first efforts are well planned, and tells some great stories along the way.

David Spann
on Jul 10, 2006