Tag: retrospective
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Timeouts and retrospectives
Posted by Simon Baker
We use timeouts and a couple of different retrospectives to drive improvement. Stop-the-line events like Pomodoro timeouts and Pomodoro retrospectives happen spontaneously within the team to solve problems immediately and produce small continual improvements. We also use a monthly retrospective for the product stream to reflect on how it's working and conceive bigger, more strategic improvements.
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Comments: 2
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Pomodoro galore
Posted by Simon Baker
Almost everything for us is now a pomodoro. Some time ago we replaced the per-iteration planning game with on-demand planning pomodoros and the end-of-iteration retrospective with a pomodoro retrospective.
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Comments: 7
Friday, 3 April 2009
Reflecting at the Fun Day
Posted by Simon Baker
We said there was a whole lotta fun to be had at our end of project retrospective fun day and that's exactly what we had - fun! And the various retrospective activities interspersed throughout the day produced a lots useful information and ideas. I plan to blog about these separately because we'll be running some experiments based on our ideas to simplify and improve the way we work as a team. In the meantime, here's some photos from the day:
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Tuesday, 24 March 2009
A whole lotta fun to be had
Posted by Simon Baker
We're going to have a fun day on Friday to celebrate the success of our most recent client. We'll start the day at My Old Dutch Pancake House for brunch and a retrospective. As we do every week, we'll be seeking some small actions to drive our continuous improvement. In the afternoon we'll hit the Bloomsbury Bowling to shoot some pool and do some ten pin bowling while engaging in a 'beerstorm', i.e. brainstorming fueled by beer. I'm keen to stimulate some transforming ideas that could take us to a whole new place. I have no preconceived notions and I'm excited to see what the team comes up with.
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Sunday, 8 March 2009
Actions from retrospectives
Posted by Simon Baker
A retrospective is pretty pointless if you don't come out of it with an action, which you then take in the next iteration. An action should be small, specific and clearly defined on a card; can be taken immediately; starts something new and good, rather than stops something bad.
Saturday, 22 November 2008
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
A 'nut it out' norm
Posted by Simon Baker
I really like the idea of having a team norm in place to help deal with interpersonal conflict. The norm would require the people involved in the conflict, as part of their membership of the team, to work together (with the help of a facilitator; aka Scrum Master) to find the root cause of their conflict. Basically get in a room and work it out before the conflict gets bigger and pulls the whole team down. The people involved are required to bring their analysis and agreement to the next retrospective and report it to the team so that everyone learns from the experience.
Comments: 1
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
People do pair-programming
Posted by Simon Baker
On the whole our team is pretty good at pair programming. Our promiscuity is ramping up nicely and we're now using the concept of rolling story ownership. It works like this: At the daily standup, when a new story is brought into play, someone will volunteer to own it. Another person will volunteer to pair on that card. They'll work on the story until the next pair-swap at which point the owner moves off the story passing ownership to his partner and a new volunteer steps in to pair. The same thing happens at the next swap and so on. Ownership of the card passes to the partner and a new person comes in to pair. The person owning the story when it's done is responsible for demonstrating the story at the showcase.
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Comments: 2
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
What's The Prime Directive really about?
Posted by Simon Baker
An interesting conversation surfaced on InfoQ that questioned the Retrospective Prime Directive. I've paraphrased a lot of it here.
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