Growing the Team: Miscellaneous Activities

Learning to reflect

Right after the first iteration, all the team leaders were invited to reflect on the iteration. Moreover, after finishing the first release cycle, a retrospective was scheduled on the process we had used so far. These retrospectives became the most important and popular meetings. They also served as a forum for the exchange and discussion of problems among peers, and later on for the discussion and coordination of new architectural requirements. So, this became the forum for the developers.

Although everybody eventually came to value this forum later on, it did not work quite so smoothly at first. For example, a typical situation was one where a team talked about its problems, but no other team voiced similar concerns. Whenever this happened, it seemed doubtful that no other team had encountered the same problem and had already found out what worked and what did not work in solving it. Typically, following these comments, one of the other teams would start talking about how they solved the problem. So, at this point, people did not really take the chance to exchange their problem-solution strategies. It was also clear that at this point, the different teams did not realize that they were all a part of one single team that should pull together and support each other, instead of watching each other fail.

All retrospectives had been further accompanied by project planning and controlling, as well as the quality assurance department.