When I first started helping out an agile team, we read User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn and then muddled our way through it for a while. It was better than what we had been doing before but the blind leading the blind is a phrase that comes to mind, when I think back on that time.
A little later, I did a Certified Scrum Master course, with Geoff Watts and was introduced to the book Agile Retrospectives. This made many missing puzzle pieces click into place. At first, I thought that my team would find the activities that are outlined in the book to be far too “American”. However, once they got into it, it became apparent that being able to look back on what you’ve done as a team and then identify ways of getting better at it on a regular basis, was hugely valuable.
You can see above, the Learning Matrix that we just did for a new project with a team of 3 developers who haven’t really work together in a structured, agile way before. It’s small steps at the moment but It getting better all the time…which is the point really!
For those that don’t know, the smiley lists things that the team thought went well, the “frownie” lists things that could do with some improvement and the lightbulb are things that you want to implement in the next iteration (yes I know that CI and TDD are odd things to be implementing for Sprint 2 and not Sprint 0!). Finally, the flowers denote people who you want to give special recognition (kudos) to. In this case, it was Pablo for adding polymorphic references and single inheritence to his Symfony 2 ORM “Mandango”. Kudos!
