LeSS: Retrospectives

The Retrospective is a critical part of succeeding with software projects. I have seen many teams ignore this and as a result be less effective than they could have been. Other teams that do retrospectives just use it as an opportunity to say what went well, what didn’t go so well and what could be done better next time without actually doing anything to improve their process.

In the LeSS framework, you will undertake two retrospectives. The first will be at the team level where individual teams inspect and adapt their ways of working and processes, and the second will be at the product level where all teams (or suitable representatives from all teams) gather to inspect and adapt the whole system.

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Continuously integrate during development

Once development teams have created their sprint backlogs they are ready to begin development. During a multi-team development effort, it’s important to integrate code continuously. This is one of the main differences between an agile and waterfall approach to development. First of all teams must be cross-functional feature teams. This essentially means that each team … Read more

LeSS: Sprint Planning Two

If Sprint Planning One is for teams to clarify backlog items as a group and select which items they take into Sprint Planning Two (SP2), then SP2 is for agreeing design decisions and creating the Sprint Backlog. The LeSS approach to SP2 would look like this: Part 1 (Teams working on closely aligned items can … Read more

LeSS: Sprint Planning One

When product teams use the LeSS framework, they will have two types of Sprint Planning (SP) events: Sprint Planning One (SP1) and Sprint Planning Two (SP2). Sprint Planning One is an opportunity for the whole product group to come together whereas SP2 is done on an individual team basis (although some teams can also opt … Read more