A simple retrospective exercise I like to use is the ‘one-word retrospective’ found in Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives by Luis Gonçalves and Ben Linders. This exercise is particularly useful for helping teams deal with their feelings.
Simply ask every team member to summarize in one word how they felt about the last sprint.
Continue reading Retrospective idea: one-word
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the size of user stories in agile projects. The idea that I’ve been reflecting on is what if teams only worked with small, similarly-sized pieces of work, rather than exponentially larger blocks of work?
In theory, small user stories should be more predictable, should include less risk, less uncertainty and less complexity. They should, therefore, take less time to complete than larger user stories… you would think! Or as Mike Cohn put it in Agile Estimating and Planning (Prentice Hall, 2006), “small stories keep work flowing”.
Continue reading The importance of small user stories
One of my favourite books on agility is The People’s Scrum (Dymaxicon, 2013) by Tobias Mayer.
A lot of books on agility focus on the mechanics of how it all fits together, who needs to be where doing what with whom in order for the machine to work more effectively.
This book is different. It focuses not on the how, but challenges the why. It is open to critically questioning every aspect of agile with the intention of uncovering the core drivers behind agile practices.
Continue reading Scrum makes one promise only
I published this on my work’s internal blog last week.
Next in my short series on supporting agile practices is planning poker (sometimes called the planning game).
Planning poker may be used when estimating the relative size of a user story, during backlog refinement or sprint planning.
Continue reading Planning pokerLast Thursday evening, I gave a presentation entitled ‘Using business process modelling for creating a definition of ready and definition of done’ at the second Lean Agile Dundee meet-up at SolarWinds.
Continue reading Business process modelling at Lean Agile Dundee