The game consists of a deck of impediment cards, a list of agile and lean good practices, and an impediment board. This game has Lean/Kanban cards and supports Lean/Kanban thinking to solve problems.
How to Become a Better Scrum Master - Agile Tour Beirut 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
During this interactive presentation you will explore the Scrum master role and provide examples of how to do it in an effective way. Humor combined with valuable insights and ideas.
Improving your quality and testing skills with gamification - Spring 2021 Onl...Ben Linders
For the first time, I’m doing a session at the Online Testing Conference. I’ll be playing games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards to help people explore how things are going and to improve their way of working.
Improving Your Quality and Testing Skills with Gamification
So many challenges, so little time. As testers we need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone involved and get the best out of people.
In this presentation, Ben Linders will play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards to show how you can explore your current quality and testing practice and decide in your team on what to improve or experiment with.
Players can use the coaching cards to discuss quality and testing values, principles, and practices. In teams, people can use the cards to share their experiences and learnings.
Different game formats can be used to share experiences on testing and quality principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively.
Takeaways
Show how to use gamification to self-assess your current way of working.
Play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards.
Explore how to facilitate games to enhance quality and testing in agile teams.
\
Online Testing Conference
OnlineTestConf was the first 100% online conference to provide all the advantages of attending professional QA related conferences: personal learning, networking etc. without the shortcomings of scheduling, expenses and travel. The conference has been running for the past 5 years on a semi-annual basis, long before COVID-19 forced all live events online.
Our next event will be our 10th OnlineTestConf! Conference attendees are from all parts of the world, we host well known speakers as well as young presenters, and discuss everything that relates to Testing and QA. Attendance is and will remain free of charge and we invite anyone who sees themselves involved in testing and the testing community to join.
Doing Valuable Agile Retrospectives -ATBru 2014 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. They help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves.But sometimes teams struggle to figure out what an agile retrospective is? And they wonder how they should do them? This presentation explains the “what” and “why” of retrospectives and the business value and benefits that they can bring. It shows several exercises from the book "Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives" to help you to facilitate retrospectives, supported with advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. Retrospectives are a great way for teams to improve their way of working, to become more agile and lean. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve continuously.
The road to agility - AgileEE conference 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Adopting agile often doesn’t go as smoothly as expected in an organization. The road to agility can be hard to travel: You can’t plan your journey up front and there will be surprises along the way. Becoming agile is a learning process which requires that you reflect regularly and adopt your way of working, finding better ways to travel.
Ben Linders will explore what teams, agile coaches, Scrum masters, and managers can do to be prepared for a journey to agility, what to pack and how to decide which road to follow along the way. This talk will help you to successfully deploy ideas and practices that you’ve learned at the conference.
How agile are you - Agile Tour London 2020 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Let’s Play a Game to Self-assess Your Agility
Every team, every organization is less or more agile. But how agile are you, and how can you increase your agility? Methods or frameworks don’t tell you how to become agile or increase your agility.
The Agile Self-Assessment Game is an “agile map” with coaching cards for Scrum, DevOps, Kanban, and Business Agility.
Playing the game inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. Join this session to experience different playing formats in teams, learn how you can discover how agile you are, and get fresh ideas to increase your agility.
Leading for Self-organization - Stretch 2020 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile is something for teams, right? True, but teams don’t function in a vacuum. As a manager, you can set the stage and support teams who want to increase their agility. This presentation explores three topics that managers can work on to make teams succeed and increase the company’s agility: Leadership, Collaboration, and Culture.
Mini workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives - Agilenext 2019 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Are your retrospective meetings not helping teams to improve? Same actions every time, people skip them, find them boring, lack of energy in the room?
This session provides ideas to recognize retrospective smells, debug your agile retrospectives, and find out when and why they aren’t working.
Let’s practice how to make retrospectives valuable again!
Teams what is in it for me - Agile Portugal 2019 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile talks a lot about self-organized teams, where developers and testers work together to deliver software. But what can you do to make teams succeed? This talk explores why people would like to work in teams, what managers can do to enable a team structure and culture, and how to (not) manage agile teams.
How to Become a Better Scrum Master - Agile Tour Beirut 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
During this interactive presentation you will explore the Scrum master role and provide examples of how to do it in an effective way. Humor combined with valuable insights and ideas.
Improving your quality and testing skills with gamification - Spring 2021 Onl...Ben Linders
For the first time, I’m doing a session at the Online Testing Conference. I’ll be playing games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards to help people explore how things are going and to improve their way of working.
Improving Your Quality and Testing Skills with Gamification
So many challenges, so little time. As testers we need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone involved and get the best out of people.
In this presentation, Ben Linders will play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards to show how you can explore your current quality and testing practice and decide in your team on what to improve or experiment with.
Players can use the coaching cards to discuss quality and testing values, principles, and practices. In teams, people can use the cards to share their experiences and learnings.
Different game formats can be used to share experiences on testing and quality principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively.
Takeaways
Show how to use gamification to self-assess your current way of working.
Play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards.
Explore how to facilitate games to enhance quality and testing in agile teams.
\
Online Testing Conference
OnlineTestConf was the first 100% online conference to provide all the advantages of attending professional QA related conferences: personal learning, networking etc. without the shortcomings of scheduling, expenses and travel. The conference has been running for the past 5 years on a semi-annual basis, long before COVID-19 forced all live events online.
Our next event will be our 10th OnlineTestConf! Conference attendees are from all parts of the world, we host well known speakers as well as young presenters, and discuss everything that relates to Testing and QA. Attendance is and will remain free of charge and we invite anyone who sees themselves involved in testing and the testing community to join.
Doing Valuable Agile Retrospectives -ATBru 2014 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. They help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves.But sometimes teams struggle to figure out what an agile retrospective is? And they wonder how they should do them? This presentation explains the “what” and “why” of retrospectives and the business value and benefits that they can bring. It shows several exercises from the book "Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives" to help you to facilitate retrospectives, supported with advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. Retrospectives are a great way for teams to improve their way of working, to become more agile and lean. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve continuously.
The road to agility - AgileEE conference 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Adopting agile often doesn’t go as smoothly as expected in an organization. The road to agility can be hard to travel: You can’t plan your journey up front and there will be surprises along the way. Becoming agile is a learning process which requires that you reflect regularly and adopt your way of working, finding better ways to travel.
Ben Linders will explore what teams, agile coaches, Scrum masters, and managers can do to be prepared for a journey to agility, what to pack and how to decide which road to follow along the way. This talk will help you to successfully deploy ideas and practices that you’ve learned at the conference.
How agile are you - Agile Tour London 2020 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Let’s Play a Game to Self-assess Your Agility
Every team, every organization is less or more agile. But how agile are you, and how can you increase your agility? Methods or frameworks don’t tell you how to become agile or increase your agility.
The Agile Self-Assessment Game is an “agile map” with coaching cards for Scrum, DevOps, Kanban, and Business Agility.
Playing the game inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. Join this session to experience different playing formats in teams, learn how you can discover how agile you are, and get fresh ideas to increase your agility.
Leading for Self-organization - Stretch 2020 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile is something for teams, right? True, but teams don’t function in a vacuum. As a manager, you can set the stage and support teams who want to increase their agility. This presentation explores three topics that managers can work on to make teams succeed and increase the company’s agility: Leadership, Collaboration, and Culture.
Mini workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives - Agilenext 2019 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Are your retrospective meetings not helping teams to improve? Same actions every time, people skip them, find them boring, lack of energy in the room?
This session provides ideas to recognize retrospective smells, debug your agile retrospectives, and find out when and why they aren’t working.
Let’s practice how to make retrospectives valuable again!
Teams what is in it for me - Agile Portugal 2019 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile talks a lot about self-organized teams, where developers and testers work together to deliver software. But what can you do to make teams succeed? This talk explores why people would like to work in teams, what managers can do to enable a team structure and culture, and how to (not) manage agile teams.
Mini workshop retrospecting your retrospectives - Experience Agile 2020 - Be...Ben Linders
The mini-workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives at eXperience Agile 2020 provides you with ideas to debug your agile retrospectives, find out why they aren’t working and learn how to spice them up and bring the energy back in the team.
Are your retrospective meetings not helping teams to improve? Same actions coming up every retro? People skip the retro, or find them boring? A lack of energy in the room? Chit-chatting instead of discussing real issues? No need for that, let’s retrospect your retrospectives!
In this mini-workshop, you will experience how to use retrospective exercises to debug your retrospective meetings. People will work in teams to reflect on how their retrospectives are going and will learn what they can do to make them valuable again.
It’s a highly interactive session, learning by doing. I’ll bring in my experience from 20 years of doing agile retrospectives, and will set a culture where people will share their ideas and learn.
Agile retrospectives should help teams to reflect at the end of each iteration to learn and decide what to improve and take action in the next iteration. Valuable Agile Retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in the organization. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value.
But sometimes retrospectives don’t live up their expectation. Problems that can happen are:
The same questions (what went well, what to improve) are being asked
Similar actions keep coming up in every retrospective
Nothing happens after the meeting, actions are not done
People are postponing or skipping the retrospective meeting
Team members complain that retrospectives are boring and a waste of time
There’s a lack of energy in the room during the meeting, people are not engaged
People don’t feel safe to speak up and share their view
Discussions in the retrospective are not about the real problems (elephant in the room)
The retrospective facilitator is leading people towards a pre-defined answer/solution
In this session, teams will be doing 5 different exercises. In a time slot of two hours, teams rotate to do 2-3 of them.
Intended audience: Scrum masters, agile coaches, tech leads, developers, testers, operations, and anyone who facilitates retrospectives.
This session includes ideas published in my book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, practices from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox, and agile coaching tools available in my webshop. It’s partly based on things that I teach in one of my workshops: Increasing Organizational Agility with Retrospectives.
Learning Objectives:
Learn to use exercises to reflect on your current practice of retrospectives
See how to create a safe and productive environment to run retrospectives
Practice effective skills for facilitating retrospectives and getting people engaged
Workshop: Problem? What problem? by Ben LindersAgile ME
If your organization wants to become agile and lean, teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively.
Playing the impediment game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they hinder teams, and decide what to do by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices. You'll learn to become more effective by recognizing impediments early and get rid of them before they become a major issue.
The impediment game teaches you the five steps for handling impediments effectively:
* recognize and analyze impediments
* find out how they hinder the team
* find effective solutions to deal with them
* decide what to do and who can do it
* learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments
Benefits for attendees:
* recognize impediments and understand how they hinder teams
* deploy agile and lean practices to deal with them
* learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments
Come play the impediment game!
Dealing effectively with impediments - Agile Management Congress 2019 - Ben L...Ben Linders
If your organization wants to become agile and lean, teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively.
Playing the Impediment Board Game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they hinder teams, and decide what to do by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices. You’ll learn to become more effective by recognizing impediments early and get rid of them before they become a major issue.
The impediment game teaches you the five steps for handling impediments effectively:
– recognize and analyze impediments
– find out how they hinder the team
– find effective solutions to deal with them
– decide what to do and who can do it
– learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments
Agile coaches use the Impediment Board Game in agile transformations to coach teams and help them to become self-organized and empowered to solve any impediments that they might face on their agile journey.
Come play the impediment board game!
Organizational agility: Taking retrospectives to the next level - DevOpsCon M...Ben Linders
Nowadays, many agile teams are doing retrospectives regularly. They are investing time to reflect, learn, and take action to improve their way of working and deal with problems that they are facing in a structural way. Organizations are seeing the benefits from this: teams that are becoming empowered, being able to deliver more value, happy employees, and fewer people leaving the organization. It’s time to take retrospectives to a higher level, and use them to reveal and solve systematic organizational problems. Problems that exist at a project or product level are related to the collaboration between teams and their stakeholders. Agile retrospectives can be used to do that, but you need a different approach. In this session, Ben Linders will show how we can use retrospectives to improve the agility of organizations.
Need for Continuous Improvement in Agile - 1stconf Melbourne 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile isn't a silver bullet, and it’s not a one size fits all approach. Continuous improvement is what makes it work, it’s at the heart of agile. Ben will show why continuous improvement matters in agile and what you can do to help your teams and organization to be more agile.
Agile Self-assessment Game - XP Days Benelux 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Becoming agile is a journey, which can be difficult to travel. Assuming that you know why you want to become agile (a first but crucial step) you start looking for ways how to get there. Questions like "what do you want to keep from your current way of working" and "what would you like to change" will come up. Then the next question is "what are ways to do this".
There isn't a silver bullet or standard route to become agile, you have to find your own way. A fixed route description won't help you. You need an "agile map" that inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go on your journey. The Agile Self-Assessment game is here for you to travel your agile journey.
Come play the Agile Self-Assessment game in teams to discover how agile you are and what you can do to increase your agility.
Players will receive a link to download the card game so that they can play it in their own organization (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 License).
Webinar enhancing quality and testing in agile teams - PractiTest - Ben LindersBen Linders
It can be hard for agile teams to deal with quality and testing challenges and decide what to do to deliver high-quality products. There are many different approaches and solutions, which, depending on the context, the problem at hand, and how they are applied, can be more or less effective.
In this webinar, Ben Linders will show you how can use gamification to self-assess your current way of working and enhance quality and testing in agile teams. Playing games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards make it possible to explore your current quality and testing practice and reach a consensus on what could be improved.
Players can use the coaching cards to discuss quality and testing values, principles, and practices. In teams, people can use the cards to share their experiences and learnings.
During the webinar, we’ll pick out cards from the coaching decks to go into detail on specific principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively.
Agile Retrospectives can be used to investigate quality issues or to agree upon actions that can improve the quality of the software that is delivered. They complement testing and provide solutions to learn and build quality in from the start. An agile retrospective is a practice for teams to reflect, learn, and to continuously become better in what they do. They focus on the process to help teams to improve products and deliver more value.
How agile are you? - Agile New England 2021 - Ben LindersBen Linders
On April 1, 2021, (no joke) I did an Agile 101 for Agile New England where we played the Agile Self-assessment Game online.
The Agile Self-assessment Game: How Agile Are You? by Ben Linders
The Agile Self-assessment Game is an Agile ” compass & map” to find out where you are and inspire you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. It’s a cooperative card game to discover how agile you are and what you can do to increase your agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
In this session, Ben Linders explored how a game can enable people to pull in ideas for change and apply those in a way that best suits their collective needs. And we have played with the Agile self-assessment cards online.
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. As an adviser, trainer, and coach, he helps organizations with effectively deploying software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers. Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean, and Quality, and a well-known speaker and author. Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game.
Teams what is in it for me - GrowIT 2018 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile talks a lot about self-organized teams, where developers and testers work together to deliver software. But what can you do to make teams succeed?
Ben Linders will explore why you want to work in a team, the benefits that teams bring, and how to (not) manage teams.
What is an agile team (and what not)
Why would you as a developer want to work in a team, what’s in it for me
Which benefits do teams have for organizations, stakeholders, customers, etc
How to manage teams, the do’s and don’ts
How developers, managers, and business people, can effectively communicate and collaborate
Keynote Need for Continuous Improvement - Agile Tour Kaunas 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile isn’t a silver bullet, and it’s not a one size fits all approach. Continuous improvement is what makes it work, it’s at the heart of agile. Ben will show why continuous improvement matters in agile and what you can do to help your teams and organization to be more agile.
Making Team Working Work - Agile by Example 2017 - Ben LindersBen Linders
People like working in teams. That is, if there’s a good environment and culture where people can actually work together and feel valued. Then you can have great teams.
Creating the right conditions and environment that enables people to work together in teams can be hard work. But it’s important, as collaboration and teamwork are essential to make agile work to deliver value.
This talk shows how you can self-assess how your team is performing and provide you with ideas to improve collaboration and teamwork to increase the agility of your team.
Spicing up Agile Retrospectives - Agile Practitioners 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why and how of agile retrospectives, with much practical tips, stories, and examples. Ben also gives full-day workshops on Valuable Agile Retrospectives.
This talk explains the “what” and “why” of retrospectives and the business value and benefits that they can bring. Examples will be given of exercises that you can use to facilitate retrospectives, supported with advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. It is based on the successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.
Problem, what problem? Agile Impediment Board Game - ACE conference 2019 - B...Ben Linders
If your organization wants to become agile and lean, your teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively. In this game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they can hinder your team, and decide what can be done and who can take appropriate action by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices.
The impediment game played in this session teaches the five steps for handling impediments effectively.
Futurespective on Software Development in 2040 - Agile Tour Brussels 2020 - B...Ben Linders
Back to the Future – A Futurespective on Software Development in 2040
We start the futurespective by sketching the future. How is software developed in 2040? Is it people, AI, or a combination? Teams, large groups, or individual work? Programming and testing, or other approaches? Continuous delivery, chunks, iterations, push or pull? Distributed, dispersed, localized teams? There are no limits, let your imagination flow to visualize ideas about developing software products in 2040.
Next, we’ll discuss what got us there. How did these new ways of developing software come into existence? How did we discover them? What experiments led to this? What drove us or influenced us along the way?
Finally, we think about the steps that we can take in 2020 to reach the castle in the sky of software development. What can we do now to become better? What should we stop as it won’t exist in the future anymore?
Let’s find out how the future of software development looks, by doing a futurespective exercise in groups!
Driving improvements with Agile Retrospectives - Project and Product Manageme...Ben Linders
Agile retrospectives have become a practice that is used by many teams to inspect and adapt their way of working. They provide insight into the activities performed and show how people are working together to deliver products
Did you know that you can also use agile retrospectives to drive improvements in projects and for products?
In his keynote, Ben Linders will explain what agile retrospectives are, how you can do them, and how they compare to project evaluations, post-mortems, and lessons-learned sessions. He will explore how you can join agile retrospectives as a project manager or product manager and the business benefits that agile retrospectives can bring.
Spicing up Agile Retrospectives - Agile Tour London 2015 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why and how of agile retrospectives, with much practical tips, stories, and examples. Ben will also give a workshop on Valuable Agile Retrospectives on October 22.
Workshop Exercises to spice up your Agile Retrospective Agile Cambridge 201...Ben Linders
Valuable agile retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in an organization. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value.
In this mini-workshop you will experience how using different exercises can help you to spice up your agile retrospectives and get more value out of them. I will also explain the why and how of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you, and provide tips for improving retrospectives in your teams.
In teams, you will practice exercises from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox to experience how to effectively facilitate retrospectives.
Playing the Agile Self-assessment Game at Agile Tour Lille 2017 - Ben LindersBen Linders
There isn’t a standard route to become agile, you have to find your own way. Methods and frameworks don’t tell you how to increase your agility. The Agile Self-Assessment Game is an ‘agile map’ that inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. I played the Agile Self-Assessment Game in teams to help them discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility.
Spicing up agile retrospectives - TopConf Linz 2017 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why, what and how of agile retrospectives, with many practical tips, stories, and examples.The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why, what and how of agile retrospectives, with many practical tips, stories, and examples.
Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way. The retrospective facilitator (often the Scrum master) should have a toolbox of retrospective exercises, and be able to pick the most effective ones. Retrospectives are a great way for teams to improve their way of working, to become more agile and lean. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve continuously.
Mini workshop retrospecting your retrospectives - Experience Agile 2020 - Be...Ben Linders
The mini-workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives at eXperience Agile 2020 provides you with ideas to debug your agile retrospectives, find out why they aren’t working and learn how to spice them up and bring the energy back in the team.
Are your retrospective meetings not helping teams to improve? Same actions coming up every retro? People skip the retro, or find them boring? A lack of energy in the room? Chit-chatting instead of discussing real issues? No need for that, let’s retrospect your retrospectives!
In this mini-workshop, you will experience how to use retrospective exercises to debug your retrospective meetings. People will work in teams to reflect on how their retrospectives are going and will learn what they can do to make them valuable again.
It’s a highly interactive session, learning by doing. I’ll bring in my experience from 20 years of doing agile retrospectives, and will set a culture where people will share their ideas and learn.
Agile retrospectives should help teams to reflect at the end of each iteration to learn and decide what to improve and take action in the next iteration. Valuable Agile Retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in the organization. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value.
But sometimes retrospectives don’t live up their expectation. Problems that can happen are:
The same questions (what went well, what to improve) are being asked
Similar actions keep coming up in every retrospective
Nothing happens after the meeting, actions are not done
People are postponing or skipping the retrospective meeting
Team members complain that retrospectives are boring and a waste of time
There’s a lack of energy in the room during the meeting, people are not engaged
People don’t feel safe to speak up and share their view
Discussions in the retrospective are not about the real problems (elephant in the room)
The retrospective facilitator is leading people towards a pre-defined answer/solution
In this session, teams will be doing 5 different exercises. In a time slot of two hours, teams rotate to do 2-3 of them.
Intended audience: Scrum masters, agile coaches, tech leads, developers, testers, operations, and anyone who facilitates retrospectives.
This session includes ideas published in my book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, practices from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox, and agile coaching tools available in my webshop. It’s partly based on things that I teach in one of my workshops: Increasing Organizational Agility with Retrospectives.
Learning Objectives:
Learn to use exercises to reflect on your current practice of retrospectives
See how to create a safe and productive environment to run retrospectives
Practice effective skills for facilitating retrospectives and getting people engaged
Workshop: Problem? What problem? by Ben LindersAgile ME
If your organization wants to become agile and lean, teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively.
Playing the impediment game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they hinder teams, and decide what to do by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices. You'll learn to become more effective by recognizing impediments early and get rid of them before they become a major issue.
The impediment game teaches you the five steps for handling impediments effectively:
* recognize and analyze impediments
* find out how they hinder the team
* find effective solutions to deal with them
* decide what to do and who can do it
* learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments
Benefits for attendees:
* recognize impediments and understand how they hinder teams
* deploy agile and lean practices to deal with them
* learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments
Come play the impediment game!
Dealing effectively with impediments - Agile Management Congress 2019 - Ben L...Ben Linders
If your organization wants to become agile and lean, teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively.
Playing the Impediment Board Game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they hinder teams, and decide what to do by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices. You’ll learn to become more effective by recognizing impediments early and get rid of them before they become a major issue.
The impediment game teaches you the five steps for handling impediments effectively:
– recognize and analyze impediments
– find out how they hinder the team
– find effective solutions to deal with them
– decide what to do and who can do it
– learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments
Agile coaches use the Impediment Board Game in agile transformations to coach teams and help them to become self-organized and empowered to solve any impediments that they might face on their agile journey.
Come play the impediment board game!
Organizational agility: Taking retrospectives to the next level - DevOpsCon M...Ben Linders
Nowadays, many agile teams are doing retrospectives regularly. They are investing time to reflect, learn, and take action to improve their way of working and deal with problems that they are facing in a structural way. Organizations are seeing the benefits from this: teams that are becoming empowered, being able to deliver more value, happy employees, and fewer people leaving the organization. It’s time to take retrospectives to a higher level, and use them to reveal and solve systematic organizational problems. Problems that exist at a project or product level are related to the collaboration between teams and their stakeholders. Agile retrospectives can be used to do that, but you need a different approach. In this session, Ben Linders will show how we can use retrospectives to improve the agility of organizations.
Need for Continuous Improvement in Agile - 1stconf Melbourne 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile isn't a silver bullet, and it’s not a one size fits all approach. Continuous improvement is what makes it work, it’s at the heart of agile. Ben will show why continuous improvement matters in agile and what you can do to help your teams and organization to be more agile.
Agile Self-assessment Game - XP Days Benelux 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Becoming agile is a journey, which can be difficult to travel. Assuming that you know why you want to become agile (a first but crucial step) you start looking for ways how to get there. Questions like "what do you want to keep from your current way of working" and "what would you like to change" will come up. Then the next question is "what are ways to do this".
There isn't a silver bullet or standard route to become agile, you have to find your own way. A fixed route description won't help you. You need an "agile map" that inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go on your journey. The Agile Self-Assessment game is here for you to travel your agile journey.
Come play the Agile Self-Assessment game in teams to discover how agile you are and what you can do to increase your agility.
Players will receive a link to download the card game so that they can play it in their own organization (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 License).
Webinar enhancing quality and testing in agile teams - PractiTest - Ben LindersBen Linders
It can be hard for agile teams to deal with quality and testing challenges and decide what to do to deliver high-quality products. There are many different approaches and solutions, which, depending on the context, the problem at hand, and how they are applied, can be more or less effective.
In this webinar, Ben Linders will show you how can use gamification to self-assess your current way of working and enhance quality and testing in agile teams. Playing games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards make it possible to explore your current quality and testing practice and reach a consensus on what could be improved.
Players can use the coaching cards to discuss quality and testing values, principles, and practices. In teams, people can use the cards to share their experiences and learnings.
During the webinar, we’ll pick out cards from the coaching decks to go into detail on specific principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively.
Agile Retrospectives can be used to investigate quality issues or to agree upon actions that can improve the quality of the software that is delivered. They complement testing and provide solutions to learn and build quality in from the start. An agile retrospective is a practice for teams to reflect, learn, and to continuously become better in what they do. They focus on the process to help teams to improve products and deliver more value.
How agile are you? - Agile New England 2021 - Ben LindersBen Linders
On April 1, 2021, (no joke) I did an Agile 101 for Agile New England where we played the Agile Self-assessment Game online.
The Agile Self-assessment Game: How Agile Are You? by Ben Linders
The Agile Self-assessment Game is an Agile ” compass & map” to find out where you are and inspire you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. It’s a cooperative card game to discover how agile you are and what you can do to increase your agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
In this session, Ben Linders explored how a game can enable people to pull in ideas for change and apply those in a way that best suits their collective needs. And we have played with the Agile self-assessment cards online.
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. As an adviser, trainer, and coach, he helps organizations with effectively deploying software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers. Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean, and Quality, and a well-known speaker and author. Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game.
Teams what is in it for me - GrowIT 2018 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile talks a lot about self-organized teams, where developers and testers work together to deliver software. But what can you do to make teams succeed?
Ben Linders will explore why you want to work in a team, the benefits that teams bring, and how to (not) manage teams.
What is an agile team (and what not)
Why would you as a developer want to work in a team, what’s in it for me
Which benefits do teams have for organizations, stakeholders, customers, etc
How to manage teams, the do’s and don’ts
How developers, managers, and business people, can effectively communicate and collaborate
Keynote Need for Continuous Improvement - Agile Tour Kaunas 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Agile isn’t a silver bullet, and it’s not a one size fits all approach. Continuous improvement is what makes it work, it’s at the heart of agile. Ben will show why continuous improvement matters in agile and what you can do to help your teams and organization to be more agile.
Making Team Working Work - Agile by Example 2017 - Ben LindersBen Linders
People like working in teams. That is, if there’s a good environment and culture where people can actually work together and feel valued. Then you can have great teams.
Creating the right conditions and environment that enables people to work together in teams can be hard work. But it’s important, as collaboration and teamwork are essential to make agile work to deliver value.
This talk shows how you can self-assess how your team is performing and provide you with ideas to improve collaboration and teamwork to increase the agility of your team.
Spicing up Agile Retrospectives - Agile Practitioners 2016 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why and how of agile retrospectives, with much practical tips, stories, and examples. Ben also gives full-day workshops on Valuable Agile Retrospectives.
This talk explains the “what” and “why” of retrospectives and the business value and benefits that they can bring. Examples will be given of exercises that you can use to facilitate retrospectives, supported with advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. It is based on the successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.
Problem, what problem? Agile Impediment Board Game - ACE conference 2019 - B...Ben Linders
If your organization wants to become agile and lean, your teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively. In this game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they can hinder your team, and decide what can be done and who can take appropriate action by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices.
The impediment game played in this session teaches the five steps for handling impediments effectively.
Futurespective on Software Development in 2040 - Agile Tour Brussels 2020 - B...Ben Linders
Back to the Future – A Futurespective on Software Development in 2040
We start the futurespective by sketching the future. How is software developed in 2040? Is it people, AI, or a combination? Teams, large groups, or individual work? Programming and testing, or other approaches? Continuous delivery, chunks, iterations, push or pull? Distributed, dispersed, localized teams? There are no limits, let your imagination flow to visualize ideas about developing software products in 2040.
Next, we’ll discuss what got us there. How did these new ways of developing software come into existence? How did we discover them? What experiments led to this? What drove us or influenced us along the way?
Finally, we think about the steps that we can take in 2020 to reach the castle in the sky of software development. What can we do now to become better? What should we stop as it won’t exist in the future anymore?
Let’s find out how the future of software development looks, by doing a futurespective exercise in groups!
Driving improvements with Agile Retrospectives - Project and Product Manageme...Ben Linders
Agile retrospectives have become a practice that is used by many teams to inspect and adapt their way of working. They provide insight into the activities performed and show how people are working together to deliver products
Did you know that you can also use agile retrospectives to drive improvements in projects and for products?
In his keynote, Ben Linders will explain what agile retrospectives are, how you can do them, and how they compare to project evaluations, post-mortems, and lessons-learned sessions. He will explore how you can join agile retrospectives as a project manager or product manager and the business benefits that agile retrospectives can bring.
Spicing up Agile Retrospectives - Agile Tour London 2015 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why and how of agile retrospectives, with much practical tips, stories, and examples. Ben will also give a workshop on Valuable Agile Retrospectives on October 22.
Workshop Exercises to spice up your Agile Retrospective Agile Cambridge 201...Ben Linders
Valuable agile retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in an organization. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value.
In this mini-workshop you will experience how using different exercises can help you to spice up your agile retrospectives and get more value out of them. I will also explain the why and how of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you, and provide tips for improving retrospectives in your teams.
In teams, you will practice exercises from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox to experience how to effectively facilitate retrospectives.
Playing the Agile Self-assessment Game at Agile Tour Lille 2017 - Ben LindersBen Linders
There isn’t a standard route to become agile, you have to find your own way. Methods and frameworks don’t tell you how to increase your agility. The Agile Self-Assessment Game is an ‘agile map’ that inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. I played the Agile Self-Assessment Game in teams to help them discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility.
Spicing up agile retrospectives - TopConf Linz 2017 - Ben LindersBen Linders
The agile manifesto proposes a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why, what and how of agile retrospectives, with many practical tips, stories, and examples.The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why, what and how of agile retrospectives, with many practical tips, stories, and examples.
Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way. The retrospective facilitator (often the Scrum master) should have a toolbox of retrospective exercises, and be able to pick the most effective ones. Retrospectives are a great way for teams to improve their way of working, to become more agile and lean. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve continuously.
Mini workshop collaborative problem solving - OOP 2021 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Problem? What Problem? Practice Collaborative Problem-solving
Working in teams we face problems in our daily work. As a team, we should be able to solve problems collaboratively. Agile calls these problems impediments.
Impediments can be something in the way of working, processes, tools, or organizational rules or structures. They can also be something cultural or structural.
In this mini-workshop, we’ll practice solving an impediment as a team. Next, we’ll explore how we solved it, how we worked together. What hindered and helped us. We’ll learn what we can do to collaborate better.
Agile Lean ME 2019 - Workshop Problem? What Problem? - Ben LindersBen Linders
If your organization wants to become agile and lean, teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively.
Playing the impediment game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they hinder teams, and decide what to do by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices. You'll learn to become more effective by recognizing impediments early and get rid of them before they become a major issue.
This talk explains the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, as well as the business value and benefits that they can bring. Examples will be given of exercises that you can use to facilitate retrospectives, supported with advice for introducing and improving them. These are based on the successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.
Why people hate working in Agile teams - QA Challenge Accepted 2023 - Ben Lin...Ben Linders
By now, many of us have been through one or more "agile transformations". We've been surrounded by agile coaches and Scrum masters who tried to help us adapt to agile, with managers who became servant leaders. Hopefully they weren't telling you what to do or how to do your work! A lot of people simply hate working in agile teams - Ben hears that all the time. And that is why he's here! In this talk, Ben will explore the difficulties of collaborating in teams and what we can do to make it beneficial and worthwhile for people to work in teams. Ben will delve into what teams really need, and what leaders should do and should not do to support them, including providing an environment and culture where teams can flourish and supporting teams in removing barriers. Through this talk, attendees will gain a better understanding of the reasons why people struggle to work in agile teams, and what leaders can do to create a positive and supportive environment for teams. The talk is intended for anyone working in a team or working with teams, from agile coaches and Scrum masters to managers and team members who are looking to improve their collaboration skills and create a more positive and productive work environment.
Valuable Agile Retrospectives - Book Launch for SPIder - Ben LindersBen Linders
Presentation given at the SPIder Book Event to announce the Dutch edition Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives (translation from Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives).
With plenty of exercises for your personal retrospective toolbox, Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives will help you to become more proficient in doing retrospectives and to get more out of them.
Retrospectives helpen je om agile effectief toe te passen continu te verbeteren. Je pakt ermee problemen aan en zorgt voor een goede werksfeer in je teams. Scrum masters en Agile coaches halen meer uit teams met behulp van een toolbox met retrospective oefeningen.
In deze mini-workshop geeft Ben Linders, auteur van het succesvolle boek Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives, een introductie van de “waarom” en “wat” van retrospectives. Je oefent verschillende manieren om retrospectives te doen en krijgt tips en adviezen voor het introduceren en verbeteren van retrospectives.
Learning at Scale - FlowCon France 2019 - Ben LindersBen Linders
Where we are seeing more and more individual and team level learning and continuous improvement in organizations, improvements at the higher levels still tend to pose significant challenges. We learn as a team and learn how to be a team, but when we reach the borders of our team and have to deal with more complex systems involving people from our ecosystem and even sometimes from people outside our ecosystem, many improvement practices break down and don’t lead to sustainable results. At the same time, the bigger and more complex our solutions become, the more we need to be able to secure improvement at all levels in the organization.
In this talk, Ben Linders will explore what we can do to increase our understanding of systematic problems at higher levels in organizations, and how to use that to improve the performance and agility of organizations. He will show how we can apply techniques like system/multi-team retrospectives and systems thinking to get improvement going at a level of two higher than the team, and present the benefits that this can bring to teams and organizations as a whole.
Mini workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives - Agile in the City Bristol 2...Ben Linders
In this mini-workshop, you will experience how to use retrospective exercises to debug your retrospective meetings. People will work in teams to reflect how their retrospectives are going and will learn what they can do to make them valuable again.
It’s a highly interactive session, learning by doing. I’ll bring in my experience from 18 years of doing agile retrospectives, and will set a culture where people will share their ideas and learn.
Futurespective on software development in 2040 - Aginext - Ben LindersBen Linders
I just came back from 2040 to find out that we are still making software. But it’s not as we know it, Jim! Software development is done completely differently compared to the agile wave that we had at the start of the century. How different? Well, let’s futuresplore it together.
Improving Your Testing Skills and Practices with Gamification - Testing Unite...Ben Linders
So many challenges, so little time. As testers or quality engineers, we need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone engaged and get the best out of people.
In this presentation, Ben Linders will show how playing games (onsite or online) with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards help to explore your current quality and testing practice and decide as a team on what to improve or experiment with.
During this interactive presentation, you will explore the Scrum master’s role and you will see examples of how to do it in an effective way. Humor combined with valuable insights and ideas.
Similar to Lean Impediment Game - Lean Kanban France 2017 - Ben Linders (16)
Have you ever wondered how search works while visiting an e-commerce site, internal website, or searching through other types of online resources? Look no further than this informative session on the ways that taxonomies help end-users navigate the internet! Hear from taxonomists and other information professionals who have first-hand experience creating and working with taxonomies that aid in navigation, search, and discovery across a range of disciplines.
0x01 - Newton's Third Law: Static vs. Dynamic AbusersOWASP Beja
f you offer a service on the web, odds are that someone will abuse it. Be it an API, a SaaS, a PaaS, or even a static website, someone somewhere will try to figure out a way to use it to their own needs. In this talk we'll compare measures that are effective against static attackers and how to battle a dynamic attacker who adapts to your counter-measures.
About the Speaker
===============
Diogo Sousa, Engineering Manager @ Canonical
An opinionated individual with an interest in cryptography and its intersection with secure software development.
Sharpen existing tools or get a new toolbox? Contemporary cluster initiatives...Orkestra
UIIN Conference, Madrid, 27-29 May 2024
James Wilson, Orkestra and Deusto Business School
Emily Wise, Lund University
Madeline Smith, The Glasgow School of Art
This presentation by Morris Kleiner (University of Minnesota), was made during the discussion “Competition and Regulation in Professions and Occupations” held at the Working Party No. 2 on Competition and Regulation on 10 June 2024. More papers and presentations on the topic can be found out at oe.cd/crps.
This presentation was uploaded with the author’s consent.
Acorn Recovery: Restore IT infra within minutesIP ServerOne
Introducing Acorn Recovery as a Service, a simple, fast, and secure managed disaster recovery (DRaaS) by IP ServerOne. A DR solution that helps restore your IT infra within minutes.
11. Jeux et livres de Ben Linders en français
Jeu d’auto-évaluation Agile
French edition of Agile Self-Assessment Game
Tires Profit des Rétrospectives Agiles
Avec une large panoplie d’activités, Tirer profit des
rétrospectives agiles vous aidera à devenir plus
efficace dans l’animation de rétrospectives et d’en
retirer davantage
Avant-propos d’Esther Derby et Alexandre Boutin.
12. Agile Self-assessment Game
Teams/organizations to self-assess their agility
• Cards with agile principles & practices
• Playing suggestions
• Expansion packs
French Edition by Fabrice Aimetti
BenLinders.com/game PDF download
increase agility, deliver more value to customers/stakeholders
13. @BenLinders - BenLinders.com 13
What Drives Quality
Deep Dive into Software Quality with Practical
Solutions for Delivering High Quality Products
for software developers and testers, architects,
Product Owners, agile coaches, Scrum masters,
project managers, and operational and senior
managers who consider quality to be important
Released: September 30, 2017
Available on Amazon, leanpub, BenLinders
14. @BenLinders - BenLinders.com 14
Continuous Improvement
Become aware of importance of
continuous improvement,
Explore how it’s engrained in agile
software development
Suggestions that you can use in your
daily work to improve continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
Leanpub.com/continuousimprovement
“Continuous Improvement is the act of continuously doing whatever helps to
become better and thus more valuable”
15. @BenLinders - BenLinders.com 15
Getting More out of Agile & Lean
Practices for teams and stakeholders to develop the right
products, deliver faster, increase quality, and create
happy high performing teams.
Full Day Workshop:
Deploying practices effectively
Improve Collaboration
Tips & Trick for Agile & Lean
Improve Continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
BenLinders.com/agilelean