InfoQ Homepage Retrospectives Content on InfoQ
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Health Check: Has Your Team Got Rhythm?
Agile work keeps things simple by putting in place some basic patterns. Sometimes, when problems arise within the process, complex solutions can be averted by simply re-establishing a rhythm in the cycle of releases, iterations, days, stories/features. Agile Journal, in their Metrics edition, published three articles which mention the importance of rhythm as a diagnostic.
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Sowing Organic Change
Kevin Rutherford blogged recently on fostering change, rather than imposing it, this latter strategy being more likely to backfire. He's provided three tools useful to get the ball rolling and keep it moving.
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Imagine the End, to Begin Well
Agile trainer and coach Andy Pols has reported that at SPA2006, retrospectives guru Norm Kerth described the practice of "Kick-Off Retrospectives", which ask participants to imagine how they will answer at a future retrospective: "What was so good about this project that you'd like to repeat it on future projects?" This can set expectations and inform the team's planning for collaboration.
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Meeting the Challenge of Collective Code Ownership
The challenge: find the balance between pure practice and local compromise. Martin Fowler has brought us a story of a team in trouble, which took a step back to improve coding discipline and brush up on the basic practices that support collective ownership. In addition to the short-term gains of increased velocity and improved morale, the overall quality of the team's output improved as well.
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Thirty Days to Better Software
J.T. King describes the idea that you can slowly improve the way that you work over time by trying something for 30 days, giving it a fair chance, then assessing how well it worked for you.
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Is the Feedback Loop Worth the Time?
John Brothers, on Indefinite Articles, blogged an interesting conversation last week between Mary Poppendieck and Robert Bogue. Drawn from the Agile Project Management newsgroup, it pointed out two different stances on the relative cost and value of "frequent feedback", a key component of Agile methodologies.
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The Art of Performance Feedback
The Agile approach, with its emphasis on "people over process" and "face-to-face communication", requires that managers pay attention to developing their communication skills. This is particularly important when helping employees improve their performance at work. Paul B. Brown has reviewed three recent books on the subject.