Learning from Experience with Retrospectives

Published February 8th, 2011 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

The concept of “Kaizen” exists in Lean to build a continuous improvement culture. So how do we implement that? Many teams use retrospectives. This video discusses how we can make retrospectives effective.

Watch Part 1 on Skillsmatter.com
Watch Part 2 on Skillsmatter.com

Resource: Refactoring Your Development Process with Retrospectives by Rachel Davies

Breaking Your Agile Addiction

Published December 2nd, 2010 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Rachel Davies believes there is not one Agile solution for everybody, but rather each team should learn how to evolve their own methods and process that fit to their environment.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Breaking-Your-Agile-Addiction

Resource: Agile Coaching Tips by Rachel Davies

Rachel Davies on Agile Coaching

Published November 15th, 2010 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

Rachel Davies, the author of the book “Agile Coaching” published by Pragmatic Programmers, discusses Agile Coaching.

Resources:
* Review of the Agile Coaching book
* Article Agile Coaching Tips by Rachel Davies

Non-Functional Requirements: Do User Stories Really Help?

Published May 31st, 2010 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

How does a team make sure they don’t lose sight of “non-functional requirements”? Are user stories of any use to make infrastructure more visible in the product backlog? This video presents how teams attempted to resolve these concerns. Discover patterns and anti-patterns of non-functional requirements in an agile world.

Video produced by DevOps

Slides of the presentation

Agile Mashups

Published May 14th, 2009 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

It is rare to come across a team that are following an agile software method such as Scrum or XP by the book. Most teams create their own “mashup” of agile practices to suit their unique situation. This talk highlights what’s on offer in the different agile methods, where different agile practices add value and how to go about blending them into your current approach.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/agile-mashups

Agile Coaching Tips

Published May 5th, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

The talk focuses on the top ten tips for agile coaching, Rachel Davies moves from ten down to one explaining each point and how to implement them in your team.

Agile Retrospectives

Published June 19th, 2008 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

In this Skills Matter In-the-Brain session Agile expert, Rachel Davies discussed Agile retrospectives. Retrospectives are meetings that get the whole team involved in the review of past events and brainstorming ideas for working more effectively going forward. Actions for applying lessons learned are developed for the team by the team. Scrum teams hold their retrospectives at the end of every Sprint. This talk explained what you need to do to facilitate an effective retrospective for your team.

Rachel has been applying agile approaches since 2000 and has experience of a range of agile methods including XP, SCRUM, Lean and DSDM. Rachel has authored several Agile and Scrum related courses and regularly teaches at Skills Matter.

Additional Resources:

Refactoring Your Development Process with Retrospectives

An anatomy of a retrospective

Heartbeat Retrospectives to Amplify Team Effectiveness

Extracts from Agile Retrospectives

Rachel Davies on Generic Agile

Published June 4th, 2008 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

In this interview taken by Deborah Hartmann during Agile 2007, Rachel Davies, director of Agile Alliance, talks about Generic Agile, about the necessity to understand what is important in a development process, rather than sticking with a strict Agile method.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Generic-Agile-Rachel-Davies

In The Brain of Rachel Davies on Scaling Scrum

Published April 1st, 2008 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

During this session on the Scaling of Scrum, Rachel Davies shared her experience, applying Scrum when working with multiple and distributed teams, and explained how to to apply Scrum in such projects without losing the essence. Rachel has been applying agile approaches since 2000 and has experience of a range of agile methods including XP, SCRUM, Lean and DSDM. Rachel has authored several Agile and Scrum related courses and regularly teaches at Skills Matter.

WATCH THE PODCAST HERE: Rachel Davies on Scaling Scrum