Retrospectives on BoochTek, LLC

Team Values

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 22:56:46 +0000

I held a retrospective with my new team last week. The team includes 2 senior developers, 2 junior developers, a product owner, and a product analyst. I’ve joined the team as an engineering manager, which I think of more as a team lead with an elevated title. Being new to this group, I wanted a way to understand their values. What motivates them? What common values do we share that we can leverage to move forward in the same direction?

2015 Year in Review

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 23:28:38 +0000

It’s that time of year again — time for a retrospective on how I did on my goals for the year. I had 5 main goals for 2015:

Job Hunting
Conferences
Blogging
Programming Language Design
Writing an Agile Book

Job Hunting

I got pretty lucky on this one. My main contract with Mercy got extended several times. Amos and I must have been doing a good job of keeping the customer happy. We even made it through a couple rounds of layoffs. I’m wrapping up the gig at Mercy now. I’m working one day a week there, as the project winds down.

Happiness Retrospective

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 23:56:58 +0000

I facilitated a retrospective today; it was one of the best retros I’ve ever been involved with. I figured out what activities I wanted to do earlier in the morning. They were really quite simple. I wanted to focus on happiness.

How happy are you at work?

I started with two questions that I’ve used with teams before, to some success (although not so successful for one particular team). The first question I asked was “How happy are you at work?” I had them put a rating from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning they should have quit last week, and 10 meaning they couldn’t imaging being happier at work.

Impromptu Retrospective

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 21:44:44 +0000

I’m surprised that I haven’t gotten this story down in print before. It’s something I’ve mentioned many times — including a few times on the podcast. It’s a great story about the power of retrospectives, and it’s a great story about the power of a blameless post-mortem.

I don’t recall all the specifics at this point. It was about 5 years ago. I’d just noticed that Arun had made some sort of mistake. That’s fine, people make mistakes. The thing that was different about his mistake was that I had made the same mistake about a week prior. And Amos had made the same mistake about a week before that.