Every day of the week, Medium’s reading suggestions algorithm goes to work to provide me with the best selection of articles to confirm my existing biases, so that I can start the day with a smile, assured that my thinking is right while everyone else’s outside of my bubble is wrong. It’s a tough job, and sometimes the algorithm is tired and decides to take some shortcuts. Lately, these shortcuts have taken the form of shoving over to my inbox every article that tries to explain “what Agile is” to me and the unknowing world.

I ignored these suggestions for…

Many years ago, when “why would I need a smartphone, I only use my mobile for making calls and texting” was still a thing in Germany, and Agile was not yet dead, I joined a small app agency in Munich, eager to build amazing mobile apps to conquer the world. The first project that came my way sounded just like what I was looking for: an overhaul of a pioneering iOS app that allowed kids to interact with animated books. The new version needed to be available on iOS and Android and include a couple of great new features.

The…

On the trickiness of measuring performance of engineering teams — Part 2 of 2: Five Key Metrics for Software Delivery and Operational Performance / Why we have to dig even deeper / Summary

In the previous post (part 1 of 2), I have discussed the importance of having a good reason to measure performance, the attributes of good performance metrics, and why sprint velocity does not qualify as a performance metric.

Four magic numbers

So if sprint velocity does not help us with measuring performance, what does? The DevOps research and assessment program has some answers. DORA is the “longest running academically rigorous research investigation into the capabilities and practices that predict software delivery performance and productivity”. The research was initiated by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim and resulted in the book “Accelerate”…

On the trickiness of measuring performance of engineering teams — Part 1 of 2: Why measure performance / Characteristics of good performance metrics / A look at sprint velocity

Recently I participated in a passionate team discussion about engineering performance KPIs. To illustrate a few points, I dug out a presentation about measuring engineering performance I did a while ago to a rather small round of people. The title of the presentation was “Stop obsessing about velocity”, but that was more of a hook to talk about more generic topics such as metrics dichotomies and delivery performance indicators. …

tl;dr

In this blog post I am sharing my experience of organizing, preparing and running the World Retro Day @ Agile Munich workshop for multiple teams, using different facilitation techniques and addressing different topics. If you are here only to download the instructions for the workshop — just scroll down, you cannot miss them.

World Retrospective Day

Did you know what strawberries, polar bears, Pokémon and Kahlua have in common? Neither did I until I checked what was being celebrated around the world on February 27th. And that’s not even mentioning the Inconvenience Yourself Day, a day dedicated to getting out of bed…