Hi folks,

Our March SFAgile.org meeting will focus on Retrospectives. I hope you can join us at Supinfo and learn from Steve and Chris how just an hour a week can help dramatically improve your team's performance.

Description

A Retrospective is a special meeting that is held after a development team completes an increment of work, and is designed to help team members find ways to improve both the technical and the "teamwork" aspects of their work process. The Retrospective is a fundamental and essential meeting in Agile development, because it is the mechanism whereby inspection and adaptation take place.
Many people are probably familiar with the older "post-mortem" meeting, which was typically used to discover what went wrong in a development effort after it was too late to do anything about it. Retrospectives, by contrast, are conducted on a regular basis throughout a development effort, so that teams can make timely corrections when something goes wrong.
Retrospectives are the Agile team’s most powerful tool for facilitating continuous improvement. We’ve all encountered teams that make the same mistakes and suffer the same pain over and over again. The good news is that it’s possible for just about any team to break this cycle by investing as little as an hour a week in learning to use retrospectives to systematically and incrementally improve performance. In this workshop, you will learn how to use Retrospectives to put your team on a path of continuous improvement.

Bios

Chris Sims helps software development teams improve their productivity and happiness. His approach combines experiential training, coaching, and even direct technical contribution.
Chris is the founder of Agile Learning Labs, as well as the Bay Area Agile Managers Support Group. He is on the board of BayAPLN, the Bay Area chapter of the Agile Project Leadership Network, and is a past chair of the IEEE Technical Management Council of Silicon Valley. He has published over 50 articles on agile topics on InfoQ, and even more on the Agile Learning Labs blog.
Chris is a certified ScrumMaster and practitioner, who has been helping agile teams succeed since the turn of the century. He has made a living in roles such as: Scrum Master, Product Owner, Engineering Manager, Project Manager, C++ Developer, Musician, and Auto Mechanic.

Steve Bockman is a certified ScrumMaster, Agile coach and innovator who began his career as a software developer in 1977. Steve is the founder of North Bay Agile, and the creator of an intuitive estimation technique that many find easier and faster than Planning Poker.
Steve's conference presentations include: Agile2007, Agile2008, as well as Agile Open California 2007, 2008 and 2009. He has presented for professional organizations including: North Bay Agile, BayXP - Silicon Valley Agile, Bay Area Agile Project Leadership Network, and the Bay Area Association of Database Developers.
Steve continually strives to communicate the essence of Agile development to novices and help advanced practitioners grow their skills.