Archive for category retrospectives

A Mirror for the Team

Posted by David Bland in agile, facilitation, retrospectives, scrum on July 20, 2010

ScrumMaster Lego MirrorAlistair Cockburn once stated that Scrum is a mirror, and that organizations need to look into the Scrum mirror no matter how difficult it may be.

I would take that a step further and say that the ScrumMaster is the mirror for the team.

A team often unintentionally falls back into situations in which they’ve previously committed to improving.

For example, let’s say that in the last iteration retrospective the team decided that they need to expand the ownership of each story. The last iteration was a success, yet it seemed as though they were not collaborating effectively. Each user story had one developer doing most, if not all of the assigned tasks… [Read More]

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SaMoLo in Retrospectives

Posted by David Bland in agile, extreme programming, retrospectives, scrum on May 11, 2010

SaMoLo, or the Same as, More of, Less of technique, is a fine tuning facilitation exercise with roots in early XP.

‘Same As’ are those traits that you value and don’t want to lose. Many traditional feedback methods end up glossing over these items and as a result the behaviors that should be reinforced, aren’t.

‘More Of’ are those traits that you want to encourage. It may be a newly acquired skill or the beginning of a behavior. Or it may be an area where something is lacking and you want to help ther person find a way of bridging the gap.

‘Less Of’ are those traits that have simply gone too far. They may be great traits, but eventually someone will ‘out Herods, Herod’ and things need to return to normal. – fairlygoodpractices.com

Thanks in part to Jeff Nielsen, I’ve discovered that SaMoLo can also be the sweet spot for easing new teams into iteration retrospectives.

  1. It is easy to remember
  2. More engaging than What worked? What didn’t?
  3. Takes 30 to 40 minutes
  4. Pairs well with other exercises

In a recent iteration retrospective I paired the SaMoLo technique with… [Read More]

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Everyone Has a Voice in Retrospectives

Posted by David Bland in agile, retrospectives on March 1, 2010

It can be difficult to get team members to be vocal in retrospectives. I’m always wary of the stronger personalities controlling the conversation, and I’ve found that going around the room calling people out by name can have mixed results. After reading a recent article on effective retrospective formats, I decided to write my experience [...]

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