I attended an excellent talk by Jon Terry, the CEO of LeanKit, who talked about the approach LeanKit took to help their teams stay lean and make good decisions as they grew from a small start-up to a medium-sized enterprise.
One way to keep Retrospectives fresh is to set explicit goals for each session. However, just choosing a goal isn’t quite enough. You want to choose a Goldilocks Goal that opens up the discussion 'just right'.
We've created a set of "working agreements", which call out best practices and common aims we have, with a view to embedding these in all projects in the division and encouraging consistency.
Over the years, our development teams have evolved, disbanded and been created. Most of the time, each team has been given full autonomy over how they work. We have ended up with is a collection of teams with disparate approaches to the same mission - creating great software.
If times are tough on an agile project, whatever you do, don't cancel the Retrospective meeting. If you think that having the team in a meeting room for one hour every two weeks is going to make your project fail, then it's going to fail anyway.
This Wednesday, one of the teams I work with shipped a new version of their product - the DLM Dashboard - for the 10th Wednesday in a row. That's 10 releases in the 10 weeks we've had of 2015 so far. Which is pretty cool.
To some the Scaled Agile Framework seems like agile with it's heart removed and the process turned up to 11; a set of guidelines and practices designed by consultancies to sell "Agile" to organisations undertaking large software development programmes. They believe it's promises to synchronise, homogenise and constrain a legion of development teams are irresistible to companies that want... Continue Reading →
The 'Agile Release Train' has been popularised as part of the Scaled Agile Framework - a set of guidelines aimed to bring agile software development to the enterprise and programme delivery. In the framework, the train metaphor is used to describe a series of iterative releases set to a strict schedule that multiple teams must abide by... Continue Reading →
Last week, my team released a beta version of the product we have been working on for the last six months - SQL Lighthouse. This week, everyone on the team has been reminded how motivating it is to see an idea you've been working on start to gather recognition and, more importantly for us, users. At... Continue Reading →
Introduction I thought I’d share a sprint retrospective activity I came up with recently. As I outlined in a previous post, I like to structure the retrospectives I facilitate in the form popularised by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen in their book Agile Retrospectives. That structure has five sections, each with a specific goal: Set the... Continue Reading →
Leading Agile Teams 