Tag Archives: Retrospectives

Episode 184: Agile Virtual (Pizza) Summit with Adam Weisbart

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Craig, Renee and Tony catch up with old friend and “irregular” guest Adam Weisbart about Agile Virtual Summit, Recess retrospectives, Build Your Own Scrum and making your own pizza.

  • Renee realised Washington state is nowhere near Washington, DC
  • Agile Virtual Summit 1-5 June 2020 – a collection of great speakers and registration is free!
  • Distributed retrospectives – important that people give a voice-over to the items that they add
  • Tips for Remote Agile ceremonies – recreate being in the same room with technology as much as possible, avoid the asynchronous Slack bots, actually standup,
  • At Slack, you are not allowed to hold a meeting via Slack!
  • Recess – retrospectives in a box!
  • Making virtual retrospectives fun – change them up, craft retrospectives into a story (Recess does this), remember the future (where would you be if you had the most awesome sprint ever)
  • The next thing in Agile just sounds like Agility!
  • No apologies meeting rule for children, dogs or ringing the bell…
  • Build Your Own Scrum in a virtual world works well on Miro and Mural (and the exercise started as an accidental panic!)
  • Build Your Own LeSS
  • Bad Scrum Master Video
  • pizzamaking.com is the nicest place on the entire internet
  • ‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here’s why that happens

TheAgileRevolution-184 (57 minutes)

Episode 181: Change it with the BOSSAnova with Jutta Eckstein

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! conference in Brisbane and chat with Jutta Eckstein, author of “Agile Software Development in the Large“, “Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams“, “Retrospectives for Organisational Change” “Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in Your Project Portfolio” with Johanna Rothman and “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption” with John Buck

  • Smalltalk and pattern languages was where a lot of the early work and a lot of the early players converged
  • Scrum had great marketing and certification over Extreme Programming
  • Agile Software Development in the Large came out in 2004 and was probably way before its time
  • Craig Larman and Bas Vodde book “Scaling Lean & Agile Development“
  • IBM book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum“
  • A framework is not really necessary, stick with the Agile values and principles regardless of your context
  • Heart of Agile (and Tony’s rant on scaling)
  • 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes
  • Retrospectives are great for any sort of change, not just software
  • There is no way of becoming Agile as a company without the CFO on board and moving from yearly budgeting – beyond budgeting assists from both the money side and the strategic side
  • Sociocracy looks at the organisation from the structure side – we need to build structures that allow us to make decisions more quickly through double linking and built in feedback loops
  • Open Space techniques are essential for facilitation and product liftoff and about using the passion of the people for innovation of your products
  • If you trust people maybe its cheaper than checking procedures
  • Need some background, come up with a hypothesis, design some experiments and measure
  • Experiments need to be safe to fail – either if the hypothesis is not true or the outcome is not valuable
  • Not “safe to fail” but “failing safely” or “safe to learn”
  • Publish your experiments so people can learn from each other (even if only internally)
  • agilebossanova.com – collecting stories
  • Agile Alliance Speaker Reimbursement initiative – support for Agile meetups and conferences to bring in external speakers and go towards cover travel reimbursements

TheAgileRevolution-181 (41 minutes)

Episode 162: Leadership and Coaching Beyond the Team with Esther Derby

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and catch up with Esther Derby, co-author of numerous agile books including Agile Retrospectives and Behind Closed Doors. We also ask the question whether Tony is cool or not….

  • Agile Australia keynote “Leaders At All Levels“
  • Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem
  • Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment
  • Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions
  • Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills
  • Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the work and access to resources required) and constraints (guidelines to know to act and decide) – things you need to consider if you want to move a complex, adaptive system and build empowered teams
  • Need to focus on the work that needs to be done not just on the little boxes or our job description
  • Ask the question to leadership – what are you willing to change?
  • Coaching Beyond the Team workshop with Don Grey
  • Whilst smaller organisations can focus on the team, bigger organisations have to focus on the systemic level to make any visible difference
  • People are interested in the allure of the Agile benefits and what to cherry pick in relation to practices, the same happened with TQM and Lean – need to ask what next shift will help you deliver value to your customers
  • The millenials will be a big disruptor to management practices

TheAgileRevolution-162 (32 minutes)

Episode 84: Retrospectives in Middle Earth with Rachael Tempest Wood

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P1020445Rachael Tempest Wood from Nomad8 in Wellington joins Tony and Craig in the Brisbane Queen Street Mall over lunch with a bonus busker on saxophone and they discuss:

TheAgileRevolution-84 (25 minutes)

Episode 52: YOW! 2012 Retrospectives with Aino Vonge Corry

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Aino Vonge CorryIn this episode Craig and Renee talk to Aino Vonge Corry (@apaipi) at YOW! 2012 and discuss:

  • Retrospectives
  • Design patterns
  • Trojan retrospectives
  • Enterprise retrospective patterns
  • Retrospective facilitators – part of the team?
  • Distributed retrospectives (and a plug for Linoit)
  • The importance of acknowledging success and learning
  • Women in IT

Thankyou to the YOW! 2012 conference for inviting The Agile Revolution to record podcast interviews at the conference!

TheAgileRevolution-52 (36 minutes)

Episode 17: Bad Smell Bingo

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BingoWith Tony MIA, Craig and Renee talk about bad smells, geek stuff and daily retrospectives:

Bad Smell Bingo for stand-ups:

  • Starts late
  • Not everyone turns up
  • Not enough of a quorum
  • Not standing up
  • Running over 10 minutes (too long)
  • No focus on roadblocks
  • Not touching cards
  • No understanding/association to a story
  • Talks too long (particular individual)
  • Not focussing on the three questions (What I did yesterday, What I plan on doing today and roadblocks)
  • No consistency in the way it is run
  • Too big
  • Directed to PM
  • Directed to IM/Scrum Master
  • Conversations are not off-lined
  • Conversations are off-lined too quickly
  • Risks to delivery not understood
  • No one volunteers to help
  • Too short/not meaniful enough
  • Too boring/monotonous
  • Run like a progress report
  • Functionally unrelated teams doing the standup together
  • Too many people talking at once or no stick
  • Not talking about actions for retrospectives
  • People don’t want to be there/been told to turn up

and we missed (bad smells for story walls not included)

  • Customer never/rarely turns up
  • PM unpredictably turns up and then asks questions that they could have known if they turned up to previous sessions

How to run a Bad Smell Practice Bingo game yourself:

  1. Get your team into a room. Each person needs a single piece of paper and a pen.
  2. Choose a practice to focus on.
  3. Give everyone 3-4 minutes to brainstorm bad smells associated with this practice.
  4. Randomly choose a person to go first, they read out one item on their list.
  5. If you have the item on your list give it a tick.
  6. Go around clockwise from the first person, each person reads out one of the items on their list. Continue to tick off items on your own list if you have it as it is read out.
  7. If you have 10 ticks yell Bingo!
  8. Profit.

Quotes:

TheAgileRevolution-17 (46 minutes)

Episode 15: The Perfect World of Agile

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In My Perfect WorldThe usual crew get together again:

Quotes

“Don’t mix dev ops with dev oops!”

“99% of we bapp bugs are caused by 1% of browser types #occupyinternetexplorer”

“Gartner’s analysts are predicting that by 2012 that Agile development methods will be used in 80% of projects.”

https://twitter.com/rolldiggity/status/125316567935352832

TheAgileRevolution-15 (46 minutes)

Episode 12: The New Scrum Guide

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Scrum GuideBack to our usual revolutionists Craig, Tony and Renee take a look over Craig’s recent escapades at Agile 2011 and STANZ.

And so much time was spent on referring to this book or that book that we just had to link what books we unwittingly covered in what we like to call Tony’s Oprah Winfrey Bookclub!

Quotes:

“Some tribes are stuck. They embrace the status quo and drown out any tribe member who dares to question authority and the accepted order.”  – Seth Godin, Tribes

“Agile projects are like guided missiles, the customer discovers what they want, the developers discover how to build it and the things change along the way.” –  Henrik Kniberg

TheAgileRevolution-12 (49 minutes)