Yesterday I had the opportunity to lead a retrospective for the last class session of a new course at Portland State University. Jim Shore and Andrew Black put together a four week, 11 session (7 classes and 4 labs), course on Extreme Programming for twelve enthusiastic students - a few undergraduates, a few graduates students, a few students from local industry. As the last day, they hosted Ward Cunningham in the morning, showed demos of their work over a pizza lunch, and ended the course with a retrospective. Jim and Andrew craftily persuaded several local Agilistas (like Ward, Arlo Belshee...
I want to share this excerpt from an excerpted transcript of a July 13, 2006 audio recording. I downloaded the whole doc from Brian Robertson’s blog, “Enlightened Business” and found this jewel of a story:
“A colleague of mine spoke at a big leadership conference many years back. It was one of these big things where they had ex-presidents, Jack Welch and other big names and leaders. The people attending the conference had an evaluation sheet to determine the speaker with the most impact. The person who won, with by far the most votes, was...
A colleague who works outside the software industry asked me whether retrospectives would be good for his team and whether other Agile practices will work for them too.
Holding regular and frequent retrospectives (as well as a retrospective at the project's end) will help any project team reach its full potential. Even if your project doesn't follow an iterative life cycle, bring the team together for a retrospective at the project milestones (or monthly). Take a short "time out" for team members to recognize and consolidate what they've learned so far, and include those lessons learned in the next increment...
Please allow me a bit of a gloat.
Esther Derby and I wrote a book about retrospectives for projects using Agile methods, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) I actually held a copy in my hands for the first time just last night. The printer shipped them on Thursday. Baby books just born. Practically still wet.
The book offers information that lots of people will find useful, and that's good. But, the most exciting thing about it--it's my first book! I'm feeling all those first time author feelings, like a proud parent.
This coming week, I'm attending the Agile...
For information on the book about retrospective practice in Agile teams, see the pragmatic programmers bookshelf:
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/dlret/index.html
Also
"Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills" makes it's third public appearance in Portland Oregon, June 6-8. For more information on the course and registration forms for attending, drop me an email or attach a comment request.