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Archive for November, 2011
10 things to mess up your retrospective
5187 days
http://www.flickr.com/photos/metabolico/583204694/
It’s about time for a new list. Today, I decided to write a list on how to mess up your retrospective. There are a lot of possibilities to do this and the following tips will help you doing so 
1 – don’t prepare anything
As the retrospective is the simplest and least important meeting of all Scrum meetings, it doesn’t need any preparation. Just come together and start. Wait, where are the pens and the post-its? Forget about it! Just sit together and chat a bit.
2 – Start immediately
As there is no need to set the stage, start immediately with gathering data. Immediately start the retrospective with asking the two questions: “What went wrong?” and “What went well”. That should be sufficient to get great results.
3 – Don’t check if the tasks of the last Retro were done
We don’t care about the old crap from the last retrospective. If it was important enough, it will make it again to our retrospective results. And again, and again, and again, and again….
4 – don’t use post its
Post Its are evil! Endless trees have to die to create this evildoing. You have silent and introvert people in your team? Then maybe it is time for them to learn to speak up. It also helps to reduce all of this retrospective waste, with all of these things that can’t be solved anyway.
5 – Forget about the Insight
Insight? Isn’t it clear why you failed in your last sprint? Maybe you should also skip the “Gather data” step and instantly start to “Decide what to do”.
6 – No DUE date
Due dates are for waterfallers. As we’re working in an agile environment, we don’t need any due dates.
7 – no responsible
Repeat after me: “We’re no waterfallers”. A responsible person is a concept from the stone age. We as a team will make sure that the task will be done.
8 – No time box
This whole concept of a time box is exhausting, isn’t it? Can’t we just skip it for the retrospective? Just sit together and talk and for sure we will have something valuable in the ehh, when it is over, eventually…
9 – try to solve everything
You collected a big list of issues? Then you should try to solve all of them. It can’t be that you ignore some of the problems of the last sprint. Define a task for each identified impediment or problem and solve it in the next sprint.
10 – Always use the same scheme
Always ask the same questions and do the same exercises in all of your retrospectives. This will create a comfy environment for your team and you ensure that you’ll always have a energized and creative team. Your retrospective results will be awesome. Ignore all of this fancy new methods to facilitate a retrospective. This is all new age shit.
I’m looking forward to your experiences, when trying these things out. Please leave a comment 
Food for Though #12: Dogma sucks
1199 days
Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers. Although it generally refers to religious beliefs that are accepted without reason or evidence, they can refer to acceptable opinions of philosophers or philosophical schools, public decrees, or issued decisions of political authorities. The term derives from Greek δόγμα “that which seems to one, opinion or belief”and that from δοκέω (dokeo), “to think, to suppose, to imagine”. Dogma came to signify laws or ordinances adjudged and imposed upon others by the First Century. The plural is either dogmas or dogmata , from Greek δόγματα. (Source: Wikipedia)
Dogmatism is a wide spread bad habit in our industry. You can find it nearly everywhere. There are the vi dogmatists against the Emacs dogmatists. The C dogmatists against the C++ dogmatists. The Java dogmatists against the C# or C++ dogmatists and also the agile dogmatists against the rest. IMHO dogmatism sucks. It does not only suck once it always sucks. Dogmatism blocks progress and impedes yourself to look beyond your own nose. It does not help to bang your head against a wall a thousand time, just because this is part of your dogmatic believe. It’s not always true that your Scrum implementation failed because you did it wrong. There are a lot of cases, where a plain Scrum implementation won’t work in your environment, in your context. In such cases, it doesn’t make sense to increase the number of prayers to your Scrum god. It won’t help you. The only thing that helps now, is to stop being dogmatic and look beyond your own nose. There are a lot of interesting practises also from other “religions”. Even the evil god of “waterfalls” had some good ideas.
But dogmatism also blocks your self development. There a people who are dogmatic about there belief that they can’t sing, dance, write, coach, code, learn an instrument, you name it. In some rare cases this may be true, but in most cases this is bullshit. The human being is an awesome creature that can do the impossible. One first step could be, to leave your dogma behind you. Let’s try it out and leave a comment about your experiences.
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