The title of the previous post “Some stuff you might try in your team” perhaps was catchy or maybe finally I wrote something interesting since I’ve got a big jump of visits, so I go on with a similar title, talking about retrospectives and let’s see how it goes

There are two things that I’m doing right now when I run a retrospective:

The short version of the prime directive, aka the Toni Directive and a bit of time boxing.

The original version of the prime directive says:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

It’s too long! It takes ages to read it and in my opinion is less effective than a simple, concise, direct:

1. No blame thanks
2. We are all sure that every one did his best

That’s it, I was bored when listening to the orginal, long version, I didn’t see any blame running retros with this version neither people judging. You can try and let me know.

What about time boxing?

Well it cames after a (too) long retrospective run by me, The Kua came and told me, why not time boxing the next one?

So right now we are trying to fit our weekly/2 weeks retrospectives in half an hour, of course for an end of project retro this might be not enough.

But as a general recommendation, keep an eye on the clock, try to stop people when the conversation goes too long without adding any value, try to find an action quickly and effectively.

I had some downloads and some feedbacks, so why not spending another couple of “boxes” and write some more code?

• In this “release” there’s a simple sound (next step will be to have something like a rooster/alarm clock, that would be great)
• There’s a countdown with the minutes, seconds remaining for the current task (work or break)
• Screen is still fullsize, someone told me that he doesn’t know what to do with it when it starts, perhaps I’ll add in the future a customized menu with some graphic button at the bottom of the screen

The code, if you wanna have a look is on Google code here, the current MIDlet is here.

I wrote a small, very very simple MIDlet for time boxing since more than one person mentioned in last weeks that it would be nice to use such an application.

It’s a MIDP 2.0 app and it should work on any phone, on my N95 works fine. Depending on the number of downloads and feedbacks maybe I’ll improve it. (UI is poor, no customization possible for instance…)

MobileBoxing MIDlet