Paperback Edition available on Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble.

We present you: A new agile book with many exercises for facilitating retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they bring, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives.

This is a book for agile coaches, scrum masters, project managers, product managers and facilitators who already have some experience with retrospectives. 

With this book we are offering a half year of our work to the community to help teams all over the world to get better in doing retrospectives.

Want to stay informed about retrospectives and future versions of our book?

Join us at eepurl.com/Mem7H or join Luis Goncalves Monthly Webinar right here.

This book is being translated into many languages, they are all available on Leanpub.

Ben Linders & Luis Gonçalves

About the authors

We are both active bloggers at www.benlinders.com and https://luis-goncalves.com. On our blogs we share our experiences on several agile and lean topics including retrospectives.

During the years we have conducted many different kinds of retrospectives. We think that practicing different exercises helps to develop your own personal toolbox with retrospective exercises and get more value out of them. If you want to get some extra ideas you can access to Agile Retrospectives Ideas.

Notes:

• This book is also available on InfoQ: Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.
• Paperback Edition is published. Get your copy at Lulu, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Second Edition: Fully Revised and Extended!

What Drives Quality explores how quality plays a role in all of the software development activities. It takes a deep dive into quality by listing the relevant factors of development and management activities that drive the quality of software products. It provides a lean approach to quality by analyzing the full development chain from customer requests to delivering products to users.

I'm aiming this book at software developers and testers, architects, product owners and managers, agile coaches, Scrum masters, project managers, and operational and senior managers who consider quality to be important.

A book on quality should be practical. It should help you, the reader of this book, to improve the quality of your software and deliver better products. It should inspire you and give you energy to persevere on your quality journey. What drives quality tries to do just that, and more.

This book is based on my experience as a developer, tester, team leader, project manager, quality manager, process manager, consultant, coach, trainer, and adviser in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement. It takes a deep dive into quality with views from different perspectives and provides ideas, suggestions, practices, and experiences that will help you to improve quality of the products that your organization is delivering.

This book views software quality from an engineering, management, and social perspective. It explores the interaction between all involved in delivering high-quality software to users and provides ideas to do it quicker and at lower costs.

Three add-on packages are available with this book:

• Agile Quality Coaching Cards: 52 cards used by agile coaches and teams to investigate the quality of their products and the practices used to deliver software. With these cards, they can identify causes leading to insufficient quality and define actions to improve quality.
• Booklet Tools for Root Cause Analysis: 15 pages with practical processes, templates, checklists, and examples that help you to effectively analyze problems to identify the main causes that have led to them, and to initiate actions to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.
• Agile Self-assessment Game: This card Game helps teams to discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility. Organizations use the overall results from team assessments to decide where to invest in their agile transformation and decide what the next steps will be.

More options to buy my book and game can be found in my webstore.

Feedback on this book is very much appreciated. Please sent your suggestions, comments, ideas or questions to BenLinders@gmail.com.

This book is based on the blog series What Drives Quality by Ben Linders.

This is a book about continuous improvement in agile software development. Continuous improvement is what makes agile work. It’s at the heart of agile, whether you use Scrum, Kanban or any other agile framework.

The goal of this book is to make you aware of the importance of continuous improvement, explore how it is engrained in agile software development, and provide suggestions that you can use in your daily work to improve continuously and increase your organization's agility.

The book is a work in progress. You can buy the eBook for a discounted price as long as the book is being updated to learn more about continuous improvement. Thanks to Leanpub you will automatically receive all future versions for free :-).

Feedback on this book is very much appreciated. Please sent your suggestions, comments, ideas or questions to BenLinders@gmail.com.

Continuous Improvement is the act of continuously doing whatever helps to become better and thus more valuable - Ben Linders.

Updates:

• Also available on Amazon in Paperback at amazon.com/9492119161
• Also available in Spanish: El Juego de Autoevaluación Ágil

The Agile Self-Assessment Game is used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing the game enables teams to reflect on their own team interworking, discover how agile they are and decide what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.

This is the first book specifically about Agile Self-assessments. In this book, Ben Linders explains what self-assessments are and why you would do them, and explore how to do them using the Agile Self-assessment Game. He's also sharing experience stories from people who played the game.

This book is based on his experience as a developer, tester, team leader, project manager, quality manager, process manager, consultant, coach, trainer, and adviser in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement. It takes a deep dive into self-assessments, viewing them from different perspectives and provides ideas, suggestions, practices, and experiences that will help you to do effective agile self-assessments with your teams.

The book is aimed at Scrum masters, agile coaches, consultants leading agile transformations, developers and testers, project managers, line managers, and CxOs; basically for anyone who is looking for an effective way to help their agile teams improve and to increase the agility of their organization.

To play the game described in the book, please buy a package that includes the cards. Currently available are:

• Agile Self-assessment Game - English edition: The book (in English) with 52 basic Agile cards and expansions packs for Scrum (39 cards), Kanban (52 cards), DevOps (26 cards) and Business Agility (26 cards). Total of 195 English cards!
• Juego Autoevaluación Ágil - Spanish edition: The book (in English) with 52 basic Agile cards in Spanish and expansions packs in Spanish for Scrum (39 cards), Kanban (52 cards), DevOps (26 cards) and Business Agility (26 cards). Total of 195 Spanish cards!
• Agilní sebehodnotící hra - Czech edition: The book (in English) with 52 basic Agile cards in Czech and expansions packs in Czech for Scrum (39 cards), Kanban (52 cards), DevOps (26 cards) and Business Agility (26 cards). Total of 195 Czech cards!
• Gra Agile Self-Assessment - Polish edition: The book (in English) with 52 basic Agile cards in Polish and expansions packs in Polish for Scrum (39 cards), Kanban (52 cards), DevOps (26 cards) and Business Agility (26 cards). Total of 195 Polish cards!
• Agile Zelfevaluatie Kaarten - Dutch edition: The book (in English) with 52 basic Agile cards in Dutch and expansions packs in Dutch for Scrum (39 cards), Kanban (52 cards), DevOps (26 cards), and Business Agility (26 cards). Total of 195 Dutch cards!
• Jeu de cartes d’autoévaluation Agile - French edition: The book (in English) with 52 basic Agile cards in French. Total of 52 French cards!

Additional cards can be bought in the Agile Games webshop.

More information can be found on the Agile Self-assessment Game website.

Agile emphasizes to establish teams and give them whatever they need to do their work. This book on impediments explores how teams can effectively deal with the problems that will happen in their daily work. In agile these problems are called impediments: anything that slows down a team and needs to be dealt with. Agile teams need to be able to handle impediments.

This is the first book specifically about dealing with impediments using agile thinking with problem-solving practices. In this book, I explain why dealing with impediments matters. The book also provides approaches for you to effectively handle impediments in teams and beyond the teams. I'm also sharing experience stories from my practice.

I based this book on my experience as a developer, tester, team leader, project manager, quality manager, process manager, consultant, coach, trainer, and adviser in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. This book dives into problem solving and impediments, viewing them from different perspectives and provides ideas, suggestions, practices, and experiences that will help you to become more effective in dealing with impediments.

This book is for agile teams, Scrum masters, tech leads, agile coaches, consultants, developers and testers, project managers, line managers, and CxOs; basically, anyone who is looking for an effective way to handle impediments or support people in doing that.

With plenty of ideas, suggestions, examples, and practical cases on impediments, this book will help you to become more effective in dealing with impediments.

The full package includes two successful Agile Coaching Tools:

• The Impediment Coaching Cards: For coaches, teams, and organizations to improve impediment handling skills.
• The Impediment Board Game: Learn how to recognize impediments and explore ways for dealing with them by playing this game.

This book is also available on Amazon in paperback format: Problem? What Problem? (paperback).