Skip to main content

Agile East Anglia: Dialogue Sheets for Retrospectives and Discussion

Date: 26 march 2012

Time: 6pm for 6.30pm.

Location: The Assembly House, Theatre Street, Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 1RQ

Sponsors: Smart 421

The next Agile East Anglia meeting will be on Monday 26th March from 6pm at the The Assembly House in Norwich. To allow for better networking and socialising the session will begin in the Sir Edmund Bacon Room at 6pm, which will be setup in an informal manner. The workshop will take place from 6.30pm in the Kent room. This time instead of tea and coffee there will be a free drink (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) for everyone courtesy of our sponsors Smart 421.

To register for the event, please email paul.grenyer@gmail.com. Spaces are limited to 25 on a first come first served basis.


Dialogue Sheets for Retrospectives and Discussion

Retrospectives are a key tool in the Agile toolkit. But, they aren't easy.

Some teams do them regularly - but they can become boring and repetitive.
Other teams don't do them - they lack the time, the energy or they don't have a suitable facilitator.

To overcome these problems, and enhance teamwork, Allan Kelly has created a series of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets. These are a new tool in the Agile toolkit to inject some fun and variety into retrospectives. They also abolish the role of retrospective facilitator!

Teams which have tried dialogue retrospectives report higher energy levels, more inclusive discussions and innovative findings.

The technique can be used in other situations too, dialogue sheets exist for project kick-off and for initial Agile adoption.

This is a hands on session, everyone will get a go at undertaking a simulated retrospective based on a dialogue sheet and will learn what a dialogue sheet is, how to use one, and find some new ways to improve your work.


Allan Kelly

Over 25 years Allan Kelly has held just about every job in the software world: system admin, tester, developer, architect, product manager and development manager. Today he is based in London and works for Software Strategy Ltd. helping companies adopt and deepen Agile and Lean practices through training, consulting and coaching. He specialises in working with software product companies, aligning company strategy with products and processes.

In addition to numerous journal articles and conference presentations he is the author of “Changing Software Development: Learning to become Agile” (Wiley, 2008) and more recently "Business Patterns for Software Developers" (Wiley, 2012).

This is an Agile East Anglia event sponsored by Smart 421

Comments

  1. A positive review of last night's event: http://t.co/zemdzYOQ

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I, Robot

The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...