Using Trello for team retrospectives
Retrospectives are an important tool for Agile teams like ours. They allow the team to reflect frequently (usually at the end of an iteration) on work habits and processes, and agree how to improve them. We hold…
Continually improving our work habits with retrospectives
We've been running retrospectives at the end of each sprint for the last few months. This is how we do them and why they've been useful for improving how we work.
The digital retrospective summary
On Wednesday 27 February the digital communications team hosted the first Digital Forum. The aim of the session was to gain an understanding about how colleagues experience digital services and technology on a daily…
The meeting formerly known as ‘DAB’
The Digital Advisory Board (DAB) has been replaced with the Digital Forum. The Digital Forum will take place on the last Wednesday afternoon of each month. All staff are welcome to attend. The format of the Digital…
Internship with digital communications – Sara Fay
Sara Fay completed a four-week internship with the digital communications team. You can read about her experience in her own words below.
How and why we QA
At a conference recently one of our team was speaking about how we organise our work using Trello and the Kanban-style workflow we have settled on. A number of people told her afterwards that they were impressed with…
Seven of my favourite books on Agile
I first encountered Agile at the Scotland on Rails conference in Edinburgh in early 2008. While much of the conference (about Ruby on Rails, a server-side web application framework written in Ruby) went sailing over my…
Our team culture: Agile and fun
If you’ve read any of the posts on this blog, you might have guessed that the digital communications team is an Agile team. You’d be right. And being Agile means that we’re focused on collaborative, iterative…
When retrospective objectives stack up
During team retrospectives, which we hold at the end of each sprint, we have been guilty of agreeing to too many actions to change our processes and working practices. Needless to say, most of these don't get completed…
Planning poker—why and how we estimate
When creating a plan—whether it be a big project release plan or a smaller two-weeks’ timebox plan—you essentially need to know three things: Tasks —What are the requirements? What do you need to do? Size — How big are…