When I started with Agile and Scrum back at 2005, I was not much different from any other agile newbie, and I was complaining for having regular retrospective. “What for? We are already sitting together, we are a good team, we tell each other what should be said. It’s waste of time. Formal meeting…” Later I realized retrospective is quite useful and implemented it as one of the key Scrum practices.
The first principle of Agile manifesto says “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” But, Is our highest priority to delight our customer, or to delight our sponsor. Do we understand who the real customer is and behave accordingly?
Agile has become the de-facto standard for innovating new products in software development. But an Agile project needs good product management and good UX design to succeed. Fitting UX in with product management and Agile can be uncomfortable for UX designers. Once you get it, though, you’ll never want to work any other way.
The frontier is somewhat thin between analyzing things for continous improvement in Agile and blaming people for failure. In this blog post, John Allspaw discusses how Etsy wants to consider mistakes, errors, slips or lapses with a perspective of learning. he explains how having blameless post-mortems on outages and accidents are part of this approach.
This presentation shares a set of stories, representing lessons learned from running an agile project in a waterfall-based telecom culture. What was done differently from the enterprise waterfall-based project management standard? What agile principles and specific practices were applied? What were tangible benefits to the business from the situation where one project team became “outlaws” of the corporate culture.
The last Agile Manifesto principle states that “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” For Scrum teams, the sprint retrospective is therefore a key meeting for continuous improvement. The results are however not always satisfying. In his book “Essential Scrum“, Kenneth Rubin discusses the most common issues in sprint retrospectives that he has noticed in his Agile coaching experience.
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