Partnership & Possibilities

Just because your team members feel shy about expressing (or receiving) appreciations in public, doesn’t mean you should stop doing them. Tami Flowers told me about her solution to making sure team members know what they’ve done that helps their co-workers and to encourage them to keep doing those things. She called it “Card Pass […]

I was at a party much too late last night (after the Agile2008 banquet), and it’s good I was there. Just as I was getting ready to leave, two people walked over to me and told me a story about their retrospectives.
One of them thanked me for the book and said that it had […]

Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, writes about scenius (a.k.a., “the communal form of genius”).
Which made me think about skunk works in general and, inevitably, Agile teams and their open workspaces, in specific. Kelly describes several attributes of scenius where collective genius […]

In the “Generating Insights” phase of a retrospective, the “Group Mind” activity provides a way for teams to discover where their thinking converges and quickly identify common concerns.
The retrospective leader (RL) helps the team form three or four small groups of team members–pairs or triads, depending on the size of the team. Each small […]

So many teams complain about the “do nothing” retrospective. Team meetings can remain results-free for many reasons (possibly the topic of another post…and anyway, I’m sure Esther Derby must have written about it ).
However, one way to stimulate team members to implement action plans is to follow the energy.
Software teams usually have little […]

Stig Efsen, Trifork Scrum coach, invented a new way to help teams move the continuous improvement ideas from retrospectives into real action. In an “Agile Retrospectives” workshop last January, he showed our workshop group how to use Planning Poker for a list of ideas for actions.
As part of the Generating Insights part of the […]

About a year ago, I wrote post on FRIM, a new activity for gathering data for the work of retrospectives.
This is an update. Over the past year, I’ve had some new ideas and participants in our “Agile Retrospectives” workshop have provided their creative thoughts.
First New FRIM idea: Now when I use the FRIM […]

I’m sitting at the Portland Bar Camp, listening to my friend Tony Deis from TrackersNW. He’s tell me about how he ran a outdoor camp for high school students using Agile practices. Tony said, “We got to the campgrounds on Sunday after a long drive. It was raining. We had an Umiak to build and […]

Just back from JAOO 2007 and I have too much to write about. What a great conference!
Lucky for me, in two weeks I’ll get to attend another great conference, PNSQC, in it’s 25th anniversary edition. Twenty-five years of focusing on building quality software. And it’s not just for testers and QA people anymore. Since […]

The latest Agile Chronicles Newsletter email edition offered me the option of downloading the second Annual “State of Agile Development” survey. Seventeen hundred individuals responded to a boatload of questions from VersionOne. In response to the question, “Which of the following practices do you employ within your Agile methods? (check all that apply)”, thirty-nine percent […]