Plan on Friday, Reflect on Monday

If you work in a regular weekly iteration rhythm, it’s quite normal to think about starting the week with a planning session, and ending the week with a retrospective. I have a new idea for you, which my team have just happened upon, but which I rather like: Swap them around. Instead of trying to …

Striking the Balance

This afternoon I paired up with a colleague to fix a bug that had been introduced some time ago but, because the effects weren’t very noticeable, had only just come to our attention. Fixing the defect itself was actually quite easy – the real pain was writing a script to clean up the bad data …

9 Techniques to Save you from the Bug-Swamp

How many unresolved bugs are there in your system right now? Yes, yes, smarty-pants: the ones you already know about. Ten? Fifty? Two hundred? More?! I find it frighteningly common to see teams let a huge backlog of bugs build up. They set up a trusted system like Jira or Bugzilla and then use it …

Retrospective: The Clue is in the Name

I facilitated our regular end-of-iteration retrospective last week, and although the feedback from the team was positive, I was left with a feeling that something wasn’t right. With our second major live release looming large on the horizon, I focussed the session on the theme of ‘Success’. My aim was to give the team a …