Posted on

***Remote Agile (Part 5): Retrospectives with Distributed Teams

TL; DR: A Remote Retrospective with a Distributed Team

We started this series on remote agile with looking into practices and tools, followed by exploring virtual Liberating Structures, how to master Zoom as well as common remote agile anti-patterns. This fifth article now dives into organizing a remote Retrospective with a distributed team: practices, tools, and lessons learned.

The Scrum Guide on the Sprint Retrospective

According to the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Retrospective serves the following purpose:

Posted on

The 4 Soils — Sprint Retrospective

Scrum is like a house, where the team can be safe and self-organize. They will build trust and continuous improvement. Respect Scrum team as an ecosystem will help the team evolve and build up teamwork, and the values will come to Day by Day, Sprint by Sprint.

In every Sprint, Sprint Retrospective is an excellent chance to inspect and adapt the way of working. There are many formats to help Scrum Master facilitates the Sprint Retrospective. But I always think about the format that can focus on the team environment, the ecosystem. I keep thinking and uphold that idea, and I found the inspiration from the "Parable of the Soils”. 

Borrow that parable; I create the Sprint Retrospective format “The 4 Soils”. The meaning of this format is to focus on how to help the Scrum team define what is the good/bad impact to the Scrum house. From that, the team will have the action or change to improve/maintain the ecosystem.

Posted on

How to Run a Sprint Retrospective: The Essential Guide

Looking back at the Sprint like...

Many agile leaders agree that sprint retrospectives are considered a continuous improvement opportunity for a Scrum team to review the good, the bad—and the ugly. But, there are also team members that waver the idea of sprint retrospectives at the end of every sprint. In this blog post, I'll discuss why Sprint Retrospectives are important for a successful agile project and share some ideas to go from boring to booming.

Let's start from the beginning, shall we?

Posted on

Sprint Retrospectives With Kanban

“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly” — The Agile Manifesto

A few weeks ago we considered the Agile Manifesto from a lean perspective. We saw that it is possible to map the 12 agile principles to the seven canonical “Lean Wastes” in terms of a mitigation approach. Although it is not an exact science, the act of going through such an exercise may be useful. It can help us to improve our appreciation of how lean and agile practice relates to each other through their shared philosophical underpinnings.

Posted on

Liberating Structures 4 Scrum: Lessons from a One-Day Immersive Workshop

Why running a Liberating Structures immersive workshop? Since the beginning of 2019, the Hands-on Agile meetup in Berlin has been exploring how to apply Liberating Structures to Scrum. Beyond the basics, we have addressed the Sprint Retrospective, the Sprint Planning, the Product Backlog, as well as the Daily Scrum.

While the initial meetups went smoothly, the last two meetups felt rushed given that we usually have about two hours. Also, the changing composition of the meetup attendees has become more challenging: less than 10 percent of the approximately 150 participants so far have attended meetups.

Posted on

Webinar #10: Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns [Video]

TL;DR

The tenth Hands-on Agile webinar on sprint retrospective anti-patterns covers twelve anti-patterns of the sprint retrospective—from #NoRetro to the dispensable buffer to UNSMART action items to a missing product owner.

Webinar Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns: The Chapters

Let us start with a short refresher from the Scrum Guide. According to the Scrum Guide:

Posted on

Pattern of the Month: Timebox

A timebox is a period of fixed maximum duration in which team activities may be carried out. In Scrum, there are five timeboxed events: Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, the Sprint Review, the Sprint Retrospective, and the Sprint itself which is a timebox containing all other events. In Agile practice, the delivery of value should not be put in unnecessary delay. Brisk timeboxing can help, since events are often subject to the law of diminishing returns.

For example, it’s unlikely that spending two working days on Sprint Planning will be twice as effective as one working day. It is believed that the purposes of Sprint Planning may be reasonably accomplished in 8 hours or less. Any longer is not likely to improve the quality of the activity, and it would be better to commence work and learn from actual experience, inspecting and adapting the Sprint Backlog accordingly.