Wednesday, February 18, 2015

What do you want to look back on in Retrospectives

Peter Armstrong
Thursday, Feb 12 11:00 am

For more on a simple way to plan more effective retrospectives, see:
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Derby and Larsen

Other resources - Books:
Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews by Kerth
A Retrospective Handbook: A guide for agile teams by Kua
Retrospectives for Organizational Change: An Agile Approach by Eckstein
Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: A Toolbox of Retrospective Exercises by Gonçalves and Linders
Retr-o-Mat by Baldauf (first edition sold out, 2nd edition available in May) available at plans-for-retrospectives.com 

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Agile Coaching Institute Coaching Model

Greg Myers
Feb 11 1pm

Here is the link to the coaching model:
http://www.agilecoachinginstitute.com/agile-coaching-resources/

And the model itself:


Discussion included the idea that the model assumes you are taking the stance of an Agile coach
There is a whole science of motivation that is not explicitly identified here.  Perhaps this should be a competency on its own?


Liberating Structures

Greg Myers
Feb 11 11:30

Here is the site menu for the various liberating structures:
http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ls-menu/
There is quite a lot of info on the site, and there is also a book!  The book goes into more info on the principles behind LS, and has lots of stories and suggestions of using LS.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Surprising-Power-Liberating-Structures/dp/0615975305


We practiced the following Liberating Structures:
Informal Networking
1-2-4 All
Triz
User Experience Fishbowl

Some tips that came out during the session:
The invitation is key - spend time thinking about how to set the stage for the LS.  Make a clear ask of the group, with enough instruction to make 80% of the folks comfortable.  IT will become clearer as people do it.

Informal Networking
One minute may seem like a long time to tell your story, but it is not!

1-2-4 All
Introverts often need time to come up with ideas.  This is the "1" part of 1-2-4 All.  A suggestion was made that no time limits be put on the exercise.

One of the reasons for keeping the group discussion part of 1-2-4 All to 8 minutes is that the energy often drops, or the discussion goes into something some one person feels strongly about.  May want to consider doing a second 1-2-4 All rather than an extended discussion.  A comment was made that a drop in energy in the room may be just they way introverts are, and may not meet that the group is not interested.  Ask?

Triz
Have a clear objective that the group can agree on.  We used, "Ensure introverts are able to provide input into group discussions."  Then flip that. The Triz prompt was "How can we ensure that introverts never speak up?"  Another way (we captured input using two scribes while the group shouted out ideas): use 1-2-4 All to generate ideas for each stage.

User Experience Fishbowl
Make sure the topic is one there is interest in, or even some anxiety or concern about.  After the inner group has talked for a while, encourage questions that will inform the subsequent inner group conversation, rather than answer the questions directly.  Celebrity Interview might be a good alternative if the group wants answers to specific concerns.


Eco Cycle - What ideas are new, growing, mature, ready to die?

Greg Myers
Feb 13 11:10 am

This is a Liberating Structure, and the question was "What ideas in the Agile community are new, growing, mature, ready to die?"

The model gets is based on an analogy of the ecological lifecycle of a forest, with seeds, germinating plants, mature fruit-bearding plans and finally creative destruction.

The group generated ideas in each of these categories, then worked to identify patterns and next steps (if any)

Here is an image of the tool, from www.liberatingstructures.org:
liberating-structures-for-knowledge-sharing-29-638.jpg

Here is a picture of our completed map:

Some of the discussion included:
the idea that many of the new ideas might be invisible to us, since they have not "sprouted" yet.

Seed ideas
- Mob programming
- Flow of value (as opposed to fixed cost or time and materials) contract
- Working as a group (as opposed to pairing or Liberating Structures)
- Holocracy (or other new management styes)
- Continuous testing
- Agility as a business model
- Eliminating metrics

Germinating Ideas
- Customer Leadership and Driver
- No Estimating
- Continuous Planning
- Cloud-based services
- Walk the board standup
- Customer info security considerations
- Systems thinking
- Humanizing working environments
- refactoring
- Continuous delivery

Mature ideas
- XP Practices
- Continuous Delivery
- Self-organizing teams and systems
- small stories
- Retrospective
- Product Owner embedded with Team
- Incremental Delivery
- Frequent delivery
- Cross-Team Coordination Structures
- Quarterly Planning (caught in rigidity trap and should be killed off)

Ideas that should die off
- Off the shelf software
- 3 question standups
- Metrics used outside the team
- Functional organizations with matrix teams
- Every team member expected to be able to do everything
- Fixed bid contracts
- Rigid notions of Scrum ceremonies

The above could use additional curating, and were not rigorously scrubbed.



Pre-Agile

Greg Myers
Feb 12, 11:10 am

This idea came from Wonful Consulting

http://www.wonful.co (and they have a book coming out on this topic)

Here are snapshots from the notes:


Fwd: Eco Cycle - What ideas are new, growing, mature, ready to die?


From: Greg Myers <myers.greg@gmail.com>
Date: February 14, 2015 at 1:29:03 PM PST
To: aonw2015.sessions@bloger.com
Subject: Eco Cycle - What ideas are new, growing, mature, ready to die?

Greg Myers
Feb 13 11:10 am

This is a Liberating Structure, and the question was "What ideas in the Agile community are new, growing, mature, ready to die?"

The model gets is based on an analogy of the ecological lifecycle of a forest, with seeds, germinating plants, mature fruit-bearding plans and finally creative destruction.

The group generated ideas in each of these categories, then worked to identify patterns and next steps (if any)

Here is an image of the tool, from www.liberatingstructures.org:

Here is a picture of our completed map:

Some of the discussion included:
the idea that many of the new ideas might be invisible to us, since they have not "sprouted" yet.

Seed ideas
- Mob programming
- Flow of value (as opposed to fixed cost or time and materials) contract
- Working as a group (as opposed to pairing or Liberating Structures)
- Holocracy (or other new management styes)
- Continuous testing
- Agility as a business model
- Eliminating metrics

Germinating Ideas
- Customer Leadership and Driver
- No Estimating
- Continuous Planning
- Cloud-based services
- Walk the board standup
- Customer info security considerations
- Systems thinking
- Humanizing working environments
- refactoring
- Continuous delivery

Mature ideas
- XP Practices
- Continuous Delivery
- Self-organizing teams and systems
- small stories
- Retrospective
- Product Owner embedded with Team
- Incremental Delivery
- Frequent delivery
- Cross-Team Coordination Structures
- Quarterly Planning (caught in rigidity trap and should be killed off)

Ideas that should die off
- Off the shelf software
- 3 question standups
- Metrics used outside the team
- Functional organizations with matrix teams
- Every team member expected to be able to do everything
- Fixed bid contracts
- Rigid notions of Scrum ceremonies

The above could use additional curating, and were not rigorously scrubbed.



Notes from "The *REAL* reason we do TDD" - Jay Bazuzi

Fwd: How I work with Git R# NCrunch FluentAssertions PoshGit (A Demo)

Jay Bazuzi
Thursday 7:30pm




Friday, February 13, 2015

Ways to Agree 4/




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Virtual Meeting Etiquette

Attached

Closing




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Pure joy




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BDD Sharing

Host: Dave Patterson
Thursday Feb 12, 2015 3 PM


Cheers,
Dave

Dave Patterson
Senior Agile Software Engineering and Quality Leader
    Achieving business goals by operationalizing product and
    process improvements from a whole systems perspective
davelpat@gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davepatterson