On June 16, 2010, Linda Rising visited the Agile Methods and Open Source (AMOS) Praktikum at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Linda is an agile method experts of world renown, and she taught a lecture on project retrospectives. She also led an actual retrospective exercise for the AMOS Project. The AMOS project is the OSR Group’s staple programming course. This semester, it is developing the DosIS open source software project, a medical information system for pediatricians.
Our tweet stream provides some review of Linda’s insightful lecture:
- Successful retrospective don’t name and blame – helps focus on problem; if you name then praise #AMOS
- Norm Kerth’s Prime Directive of Retrospectives: Assume that everyone did the best they could #AMOS
- Retrospectives help learn from experiences; bring out experience, help find closure #AMOS
- People believe we learn from experience; but then she has that friend who got married 5 times #AMOS
- Software development misses experiments; projects operate on faith way too much #AMOS
- On an agile project, each iteration should involve a few small experiments #AMOS
- Last but important question to ask in a #retrospective: What still puzzles us? #AMOS
The last tweet was:
- Linda Rising at #FAU now leading a #retrospective in Agile Methods and Open Source class project #AMOS
It was the last tweet, because now the real experience began and we had all hands full! Linda led us through the following retrospectives best practices:
- Create safety
- Define success
- Offer appreciations
- Build time-line
- Show artifacts
- Define experiments
- Summarize learnings
- Hopes and wishes
Maybe the most important exercise was creating a time-line. Here is how it looked like:
Linda is a great speaker and facilitator who works magic. This guest lecture and exercise of the AMOS Praktikum was certainly a highlight of the course. The AMOS team, instructors and students, would like to say thank you very much!
Thank you Linda for your great talk and for teaching us how a retrospective works! It was very insightful. I’m looking forward to see how my experiment goes…
A big thank you from my side as well, Linda. Although not directly involved in the project, your lecture was very interesting and helpful, especially the practical part!
Thank you for the great insights and the fresh ideas I could gain on retrospecitves. I wish you all the best!
Thanks to you all for a great day! I was a pleasure to share your project retrospective and to meet such an enthusiastic class. I wish you all the best in your future project experiences and in life.
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