The last entry in my Going Agile series will look at the retrospective meeting. The retrospective meeting is held at the end of every sprint/iteration, and it is the time to discuss what went well, and what could be improved in the next sprints. Some people will say the Product Owner should be in attendance, and some believe the PO should not. IMHO, the PO is a part of the team, and should be there…and in our case, I was. We weren’t sure how to solicit input from the team, so we decided that everyone
Read More »Now that the New Year is upon us, I thought it would be a good time to add another chapter to my Going Agile series. My last entry left off at the point where we had prepared our backlog, created team rules and defined “Done”. Now we were ready for our first Iteration Planning meeting. In our “team room” we had all the essentials in place for this meeting: stacks of color-coded cards (for capturing the various to do’s, or tasks), pens and highlighters, our Scrum board (with pins) to stick our tasks onto, and
Read More »Agile Product Management and a lively talk about modern software development by Alistair Cockburn were the themes of the day. The day started off with a hotel breakfast buffet at 6:30. One thing I rarely miss when I travel is a good breakfast to start the day. My speaking opportunity was, um, unique. Basically a bunch of stages set up around all the food. Oh, and also starting at 7:45 AM. I was able to rush through my presentation and still answer a few questions. Next was the keynote speaker, Alistair Cockburn. He arrived in
Read More »Good start to the Agile 2009 show… seems bigger than last year and well organized so far. Interesting, we’re seeing lots of people from safety-critical shops – medical devices, telecom, military & aerospace, etc. Anecdotally seems like a big change from last year. Todd attended an Agile in safety critical talk that was a good general overview of why Agile is better than traditional development methods for these shops, but lacked specifics on how, why, etc. There’s an FDA & Agile presentation later in the week which will present an actual medical device case study
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