InfoQ Homepage Retrospectives Content on InfoQ
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How Long Should Retrospectives Last?
The original definition of a retrospective, as presented by Norm Kerth, was a 3 day, offsite meeting. In, Agile Retrospectives, we are given 5 phases to be covered, but no specific guidance on time. In her recent article, Rachel Davies suggests that we have 30 minutes per week under review. How long should a retrospective last to be effective?
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Why do Agile Adoptions Fail?
Although agilists focus much of their energy on helping their agile projects succeed, it is helpful to periodically stop and consider what causes some agile projects and agile adoptions to fail. Armed with this knowledge, perhaps one can avoid these same pitfalls.
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Kaizen in Lean Software Development
Lean methods employ Kaizen, or continuous improvement, to reduce waste and improve results on a regular, even daily, basis. On the leanagilescrum group, Alan asked, "Are there known techniques for facilitating kaizen activities within Lean/Agile software development?"
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Frequent Retrospectives Accelerate Learning and Improvement
When we seek process improvement by discarding traditional SDLC rules, how should we work? Retrospectives are a tool teams can use to reflect on their process and improve it gradually over time. In this article, Rachel Davies offers help for teams who have ideas for improvements but are not sure how to get them off the ground.
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InfoQ Article: Reflecting on Success: 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.
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New Forums at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.org
Agile veteran Ron Jeffries is a believer in the value of dialogue. So he's offering the Agile community a new resource, an Agile Forum, hoping it will be a brand-neutral, consultant-neutral place, open to and shared by everyone who is interested in advancing him- or herself in Agile, or in bringing Agile to the world. In XPmag, Ron's made an open invitation to both participants and volunteers.
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Book Excerpt: Agile Retrospectives
InfoQ brings you an exclusive chapter excerpt from the recent book "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great", by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. These expert facilitators show how teams can run focused, helpful retrospectives themselves, without an outside facilitator. We asked the authors a few questions about the making of their book.
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Tips for Effective Kaizen Process Improvement
Agile software development and Lean Thinking go hand-in-hand for many practitioners. Six-Sigma blackbelt Mike Wroblewski has blogged some lessons learned from a recent kaizen session. People are a key variable in both manufacturing and software environments, so his lessons learned in manufacturing are also interesting for Lean Software practitioners using kaizen events for process improvement.
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Agile Work Cheatsheets Posted
It's been said before: Agile may be simple, but it's not so easy. Mishkin Berteig contributes some one-page quick-references to jog our memories and keep us focused on delivering value.
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InfoQ Book Review: Collaboration Explained
David Spann introduces Jean Tabaka's book: "Collaboration Explained" in which she shares stories and facilitation techniques to make groups more effective, and provides templates to get them started.
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Personal Retrospective: How Did I Do?
Nynke Andering gives us an inside view of a process of self-retrospective, which she uses after a consulting engagement. She shares not only her questions, but her answers, in four categories: Collaboration, Learning, Consulting, Responsibility.
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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.