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

The Sword And Other Tales

Published October 6th, 2010 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

In this fast-moving and varied presentation, Gwyn and Laurie will condense over a year’s worth of retrospectives into one hour of shiny new practices that have been stress-tested in small web development teams. We’ll talk about the Wall of Wire, the Sword of Integration, and how to play Speed Poker with commitment and without cards. This is an experience session, so each new tool will be supported by a description of the problem that caused us to develop it, and the results of putting it into practice. Other areas we’ll cover:
* How to use a sword of integration to fix build collisions (unimportant) and weld a group of programmers into a high-performing team (important)
* How to recognize a Stealthholder before they destroy your project
* How to enhance planning poker to get more accurate estimates, faster
* How to use heat-seeking actions to make sure that meetings actually achieve something
* How to survive if you’re scrum-mastering several small projects at once
* How to use lego to introduce Agile to customers

Retrospectives

Published August 30th, 2010 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

Retrospectives are the Agile team’s most powerful tool for facilitating continuous improvement. We’ve all encountered teams that make the same mistakes and suffer the same pain over and over again. The good news is that it’s possible for just about any team to break this cycle by investing as little as an hour a week in learning to use retrospectives to systematically and incrementally improve performance. In this workshop, you will learn how to use Retrospectives to put your team on a path of continuous improvement.

The Team Reflects… Then Tunes and Adjusts – Part Two

Published August 25th, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

This is a short workshop to unpack and examine the myriad ways team members can reflect, tune & adjust individual and team behavior: e.g., PDCA, retrospectives, AARs, Stand-ups, Pair debriefing, peer feedback, and more. We will create new activities to help teams look at their behaviors, tune their teamwork, and practice or support their adjustments.

The Team Reflects… Then Tunes and Adjusts – Part One

Published August 25th, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

This is a short workshop to unpack and examine the myriad ways team members can reflect, tune & adjust individual and team behavior: e.g., PDCA, retrospectives, AARs, Stand-ups, Pair debriefing, peer feedback, and more. We will create new activities to help teams look at their behaviors, tune their teamwork, and practice or support their adjustments.

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great!

Published February 25th, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems”) are only performed at the end of the project — too late to help. In organizations where teams develop using iterative, incremental methods, Agile retrospectives at the end of each iteration or increment stimulate continuous improvement throughout the project. Exceptional software process and project improvement grows out of solid data and good planning. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, authors of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, will introduce you to a framework for effective retrospectives.

Agile Retrospective

Published February 17th, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

One of a series of short stop-action videos explaining key agile topics in plain language. This episode focuses on Agile Retrospectives.

Heartbeat Retrospectives to Amplify Team Effectiveness

Published June 26th, 2008 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

In this presentation filmed during QCon London 2007, Boris Gloger speaks about retrospectives. Agile development teams learn and improve by inspecting and adapting. High performing teams inspect and adapt not only their code and tests, but also their methods and interactions.

Boris is a Certified Scrum Master Trainer and NLP Practitioner and holds a Master in Philosophy and Sociology from TU Darmstadt, Germany. He founded SPRiNT iT, an agile software development and consulting company in Ettlingen, Germany.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heartbeat-Retrospectives-Boris-Gloger

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