Gus Talks on Retrospectives: Attack of the oversized story cards
I'd like to introduce you to
Gus
Power . I've been working with Gus since June and I'm always
ready to learn from him. He's one of the few coaches in the UK with
lean manufacturing experience having worked at Dell while they
engaged consultants from Toyota. Gus is full of ideas and insights
and I'm pleased he's decided to blog about a recent
heartbeat retrospective he
facilitated with our team. So, without further ado I pass you over
to Gus:
For this weeks'
iteration retrospective we tried a homegrown variation on the usual
heartbeat format. The idea was to condense the brainstorming and
dumb mapping exercises into one activity, using the familiar
representation of business value - the
story card - as a guide.
We drew up some big story cards on flip-chart paper and labeled
them. In this instance we used the categories:
- Slicing and Progress
- Story detail
- Ownership
- Tracking
- Estimation
- Pairing
- Acceptance testing
The cards were stuck on the wall and the team was divided into
small groups of 3-4 people. The team members brainstormed aspects
of the past iteration using post-it notes - blue for good and pink
for bad. These were stuck on the relevant area of the story card.
It's useful to have the iterations' story cards available for
reference.
Written by:
Gus
Power
Posted by Simon Baker -
Permalink
