The 4Ls is a great data gathering activity for recurring retrospectives. The Ls stand for: liked,  learned, lacked, and longed for.

Running the activity:

• Liked – things you really liked
• Learned – things you have learned
• Lacked – things you have seen the team doing, but consider that could be done better.
• Longed for – something you desired or wished for

This activity…

In a previous life, at an R&D engineering company, there was a comprehensive culture of code review. I saw three different approaches across three teams while I was there.

The first team was a mix of embedded systems and embedded applications. This team had a very strict, very rigourous code review process. Every task had an associated review. All reviews were pre-commit (completed before merging work into trunk.) Reviews typically had two reviewers. Reviewers were assigned by the tech lead, based on a combination of appropriateness and load. All reviews were conducted using a dedicated newsgroup (remember those?)…

Just a quickie: Sitting on the periphery of the Selenium project is an “add on” for Java called Fluent Selenium.

It adds a fluent API (link to Martin on such things) to Selenium 2.0’s WebDriver. As we push into a increasingly JavaScript reality for web applications, and less and less Sever Side templating, there are often timing intricacies when testing applications, and FluentSelenium attempts to give such problems elegant solutions.

Examples for Fluent Selenium

See https://github.com/paul-hammant/fluent-selenium-examples.

I have two examples described below, but here is a 50 second video of the two…

KALM (Keep, Add, More, less) is a retrospective activity that fosters the conversation to the current activities and the perceived value. It helps team members to understand each other perceived value on such practices.
 

• Keep – something the team is doing well and you recognize the value on it.
• Less – something already being done; but you rather do less of it.
• More– something already being done; and you believe will bring more value if done even more.
• Add – a new idea, or something you…

If you're reading this blog, I'm hoping you're somewhat familiar with the concept of user stories (if not, here's a good place to start). 

A key concept around user stories is that they should ideally embody 7 properties, which are usually represented by the acronym INVEST.  What's NOT often talked about is that creating stories that follow all 7 of the guidelines in the INVEST acronym simultaneously is actually pretty hard.  The various "generally good" properties can often be in tension, and getting stories to follow one can often mean trading off another. 

I don't think enough time is spent…