Retrospectives are a scrum team’s most powerful tool for facilitating continuous improvement. We’ve all encountered teams making the same mistakes and suffering the same pain over and over again. The good news is that it’s possible to break this cycle by investing as little as one hour per week in a sprint retrospective.
What: Certified Scrum Master Workshop
When: Saturday and Sunday, September 12 & 13
Where: Redwood City, CA
Who: Jeff McKenna and Chris Sims
A couple of weeks ago, Chris was the guest speaker at the Bay Area Agile Project Leadership Network's monthly meeting. It was an evening of game-playing and simulations. One of the most popular is a simple game that takes under five minutes to play, but always blows the tops of people's heads off by demonstrating concretely and irrevocably just how deeply multitasking cuts into productivity and even quality. This particular exercise led to some insightful conversations and aha moments, including:
Every time we run an Agile Project Management class we tweak it slightly, based on what we've learned in the last one. Inspect and adapt, as they say… err, I mean, as we say.
Last year, Chris was on the coordinating committee for Agile Open California, a grassroots Open Space conference for and by the local agile development community. This year, the privilege falls on me. I was bit by the Open Space bug last year, and have now been to several. The format lends itself to surfacing all kinds of ideas and expertise, and fostering the kind of feverish engagement that leads people to revolutions in their thinking. If you're a die-hard agilista, or just curious, please do join us this year on October 15 & 16 at Fort Mason, in San Francisco (there's a SoCal sister conference in September). If you register early (as in now), it's a mere $150, which is a pretty good price for guaranteed transcendental enlightenment.
Here's a blog post by David Carlton about a session called I hate Pair Programming that should give you a fair idea of the kind of content to expect. And below are some images to whet your appetite:
The fourth annual State of Agile survey is open for participation. The survey is sponsored by VersionOne Software. Over the past 3 years, the survey has provided some interesting insight into what agile practices are actually being used, and what benefits companies are getting from going agile.
I just wrote about the survey for InfoQ. Just because you read this blog, you can get a sneak peak. The rest of the world will have to wait until it hits the InfoQ front page on Monday morning.
Cheers,
Tonight, at the North Bay Agile meetup, I facilitated "The Great Requirements Showdown!" It's an experiential exercise that pits traditional written requirements against the agile alternative: user stories and face-to-face communication.
During the workshop, participants wrote down their 'Ah Ha!' moments and we shared and talked about them. Here are they are:
Here at Agile Learning Labs, we go through almost this many sticky notes every day. Almost.
BTW, registration for the August Agile Project Management learning lab closes on Monday. Check it out now!
Agile adoptions are hard, in large part because they involve changes to the corporate culture, a task requiring huge effort and significant time. At the Agile Roots conference, I met Israel Gat and he shared a different approach: work with the existing culture; don’t try to change it.