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  • Q&A with Fridtjof Detzner about Scaling and Continuous Improvement at Jimdo

    How can you make a company grow without sacrificing it’s culture? InfoQ talked with Fridtjof Detzner, co-founder of DIY website creator Jimdo, about how Jimdo started and scaled up using agile and why Jimdo uses kaizen and retrospectives to improve continuously.

  • Agile and Lean Service Management for Enterprises

    Agile software development or Scrum is not enough to make your enterprise truly deliver on the Agile promises, says Dave van Herpen. He suggests that IT service management should apply agile and lean practices combined with DevOps to improve collaboration throughout the entire enterprise.

  • Role of Managers in Agile Retrospectives

    Agile teams use retrospectives to reflect upon their way of working. Since it’s the team’s own responsibility to continuously improve themselves they have to decide upon the actions that they will do. What can managers do to support their teams when they are doing agile retrospectives?

  • The Retr-O-Mat Retrospective Activity Generator: Now Available in Print

    Random retrospective activity generator "Retr-O-Mat" now available as printed edition, contains 50 activities from various sources.

  • Having Actions Done from Retrospectives

    Agile retrospectives help teams to find and do actions to improve continuously. There are different ways to do follow up on the actions and to evaluate if actions are leading to better team performance and more value delivered to customers.

  • Combining an Agile and Lean Approach

    Several approaches exist to improve software development, among them are agile and lean. Managers have to decide which approaches to deploy in their organization. Approaches can also be combined depending on the problems that need to be solved. InfoQ interviewed Régis Medina about combining agile and lean, focusing on people and learning.

  • Adding Purpose and Hypotheses to Agile Retrospectives

    Regularly doing agile retrospectives helps teams to learn and improve themselves. You can make retrospectives more effective by adding purposes and by validating if your retrospective actions are leading to improvement with the usage of hypotheses.

  • Experiences from Applying Kanban at SAP

    The experiences with more than two years of applying Kanban at SAP were presented by Alexander Gerber and Martin Engel at Lean Kanban Central Europe. Their case study showed how they supported the implementation of lean and agile processes. InfoQ interviewed them about how Kanban was introduced and received within SAP, the training approach and the experiences from teams with the Kanban practices

  • How Retrospectives Can Support Learning in Lean Startup

    The build-measure-learn feedback loop in lean startup aims to help entrepreneurs to learn about the needs of their customers. Agile retrospectives are a way to reflect and learn and to agree on changes that are needed. Some examples describing how lean startup can be supported with agile retrospectives to learn and take actions.

  • Is Having Fun Important for Agile Teams?

    Working in an agile team can sometimes be stressful, when the needs of the customers are unclear, if there is a lot of work to be done, or when team members are having difficulties doing their work. You might ask the question if having fun could reduce the feelings of stress, increase motivation, or increase productivity? And if that is true, then what can you do to have more fun in agile teams?

  • Using Retrospectives for Personal Improvement

    Agile retrospectives are used by teams to improve their performance, by reflecting on the way of working and defining improvement actions. But retrospectives can also be used for personal improvement, additional to or as a replacement of performance appraisals. Such retrospectives can be done as a one-on-one by a manager and an employee, individually by an employee, or in a team.

  • Agile Retrospectives, Can You Skip Them?

    Teams sometimes consider to skip a retrospective meeting, when they feel time pressure, or do not see direct benefits of doing one. Next they question themselves if they have to keep doing retrospectives? Agile retrospectives help teams to learn and improve continuously, and there are valid reasons to keep doing them also with mature teams.

  • Why Do Teams Find It Difficult to Do Agile Retrospectives?

    Retrospectives are often considered to be a valuable agile technique, but sometimes teams have difficulties doing them: insufficient control of things, thinking that they can’t improve, difficulties defining good actions, or much complaining. Teams may find retrospectives boring, and a waste of their time. How to deal with this, and help teams to discover better ways to do retrospectives?

  • Using Large Agile Retrospectives to Improve Projects

    Retrospectives help teams to learn and improve their way of working. Several agile coaches have scaled retrospectives to cover larger projects or programs with multiple teams. Let’s explore how they did it.

  • Video Lessons on Agile Coaching and Organizational Change

    Two video lessons covering agile coaching and organizational change were released by Pearson/Addison-Wesley in the last quarter of 2012. They provide a different way to increase knowledge on agile adoption for visual and audible learners.

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