Prime Directive of a Personal Retrospective

Friday

30

Mar 2012

In this article, I will write about the directives or rules you should put in place for yourself while doing a personal retrospective. This article is part of my Personal Retrospective Series – so read the other articles, if you want to learn more about personal retrospectives.

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Slides for Personal Retrospectives

Friday

9

Mar 2012

This tuesday I gave a presentation at the Koblenz Java User Group (KoJUG) about Personal Retrospectives. I uploaded the presentation to SlideShare:

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5 Phases of a Personal Retrospective

Monday

5

Mar 2012

In this article I will write about the five different phases of a personal retrospective. If you are new to the topic of personal retrospectives, you should read my introduction.

The phases of a personal retrospective describe the different steps you can identify in virtually any retrospective. Everyones personal retrospective is unique – but these phases serve you as a framework, when planning your own retrospectives.

In terms of phases, there is really not much of a difference between project retrospectives and personal retrospectives. So I looked for phases in the literature – Norman Kerth names three phases: Start, Middle and End. These are a good starting point, however I think for the purpose of discussion it is better to use the stages Ester Derby and Dianne Larsen introduced.

For each phase you can select certain exercises or activities. These practices help people to recall and better understand what happened. They try to unearth hidden success stories and problems. You can find description of those exercises in

  • Kerth NL. Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews (amazon)
  • Derby E and Larsen D. Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (amazon)
  • The Agile Retrospectives Resources Wiki (link)
Some of these exercises can be used in personal retrospectives. However every exercise needs to be adapted to personal retrospectives, as it needs to be adapted to your retrospectives. I will hint at those exercises during this article. In later articles I will focus more on the individual exercises.

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Personal Retrospectives – An Introduction

Monday

20

Feb 2012

A personal retrospective is a regularly practiced ritual, during which you take time and think about yourself.

In this article, I will describe what a project retrospective is as well as what is similar to and different from a personal retrospective. Furthermore, I outline why to do a personal retrospective and tell a tiny bit about why I write about it.

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Java 8 Status Updates

Friday

23

Dec 2011

The two big new language features of the upcoming Java SE 8 release are Lambda Expressions and Modularity. For both, status updates have been released these days. I’ll share the links with you, so you might read through them over the holidays ;-)

The Java SE 8 release is planned for mid 2013 by Oracle.
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