Register Now! Continuous self-improvement of software teams is traditionally accomplished through retrospectives, a form of post-mortem held at the completion of an iteration. More often than not, retrospectives begin to fade and the list of action items keeps growing until teams simply succumb to business-as-usual practices. In some cases, teams eventually abandon retrospectives altogether because they feel like a waste of time!
Join Angela as she explains how you can use Kaizen to analyze and improve your retrospectives, regardless of your team’s process. She will begin with a brief review of what a retrospective is and walk through some examples of both healthy and unhealthy retrospective scenarios she has experienced herself. Angela will then explain the concept of Kaizen, the Kaizen process, and how you can leverage a Kaizen process to turn your retrospectives back into the effective continuous improvement tools they are meant to be!
Angela Dugan is the ALM Practice Manager for Polaris Solutions, a small technology consulting firm based out of Chicago and St. Louis. She has been in software development since 1999, including 5 years as an ALM Tools evangelist with Microsoft. Angela also runs the Chicago Visual Studio ALM user group, is an active organizer and speaker at several local conferences, is a Microsoft ALM MVP, and is both a Certified Scrum master and SAFe Program Consultant. Outside of wrangling TFS, Angela is an avid board gamer, an aspiring runner, and a Twitter addict. She lives in a 1910 house in Oak Park, Illinois that she is constantly working on/cursing at with her husband David.
