continuous improvement
Articles
 |
Back to Basics: Use the Heart of Agile to Frame Your Agile Adoption Somewhere along the way, agile implementations have gotten overblown and unwieldy. Managers and leaders look at all the models and frameworks and think agile adoption is too confusing or not worth the effort. To communicate what agile truly means, we have to simplify the message by getting to the heart of agile: collaborate, deliver, reflect, and improve. |
|
 |
Instead of MVPs, Maybe We Should Be Releasing SMURFS The term minimum viable product, or MVP, has come to be misunderstood and misused in many organizations. It doesn’t mean you should be releasing half-baked, barely feasible software. Instead, you should be thinking of your product’s capabilities as a Specifically Marketable, Useful, Releasable Feature Set—or SMURFS! |
|
 |
Revitalize Your Retrospectives with Gamification Agile and DevOps teams, which emphasize continuous improvement, can benefit greatly from effective retrospectives. However, retrospectives can get monotonous, and that’s when they become ineffective. Using gamification in your retrospectives brings a completely different dimension of thinking—and even makes the process fun. |
|
 |
Using the Definition of Done to Promote Continuous Improvement The definition of done is much more than just a checklist for completeness—it can be a mechanism for determining where your product increment can be more complete by the end of your sprint. By using a discussion board with quadrants where you can sort sprint items, you can challenge yourself to see whether a task could be moved earlier in the lifecycle. |
|
 |
What Does It Mean to Have an Agile Mindset? There has been lots of talk about the agile mindset, but what does that mean? It does not merely encompass the skills that make a successful agile team member, but also what drives a person to want to be part of an agile team. It should include the quest to learn—even when you fail—and leveraging what you learn to continuously improve on what you do. |
|
 |
An Innovation in Scrum Ceremonies: Peer Feedback Traditionally, the project manager or ScrumMaster is responsible for evaluating a team's performance. But peer feedback, when each member of a team picks another member, observes him or her, and then shares thoughts and suggestions about that other team member’s work, can also be very valuable to continuous improvement. |
|
 |
Why Teams Stop Improving—and How to Jumpstart Their Efforts One of the most important features in agile software development is continuous improvement. However, after an initial burst of inspiration and productivity, teams may stop improving because they believe there are no issues left to address or the issues are too difficult to solve. People need to switch their mental models to keep addressing processes efficiently. |
|
|
The Science of Lean Science is the building and organizing of knowledge into testable explanations and predictions about the world; lean is an approach which recognizes and leverages many scientific discoveries to enable faster flow, higher value, and greater capability. When thinking about opportunities for continuous improvement, science and lean should go hand in hand. Karl Scotland explores some of the science behind lean-from mathematics to neuroscience-in order to explain why and predict how various practices can have a positive impact on the way we work. Gain a deeper understanding of both the science of lean and how to take a scientific approach to learning in order to reap the benefits of paying attention to people, process, and economics. Leave with richer insights into why and how lean approaches work, and the ability to apply the science-and a scientific approach-to your own teams and organizations. |
Karl Scotland, Rally Software Development
|
Recommended Web Seminars
Featured Resources
Visit Our Other Communities
AgileConnection is a TechWell community.
Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.