Retrospective with Sailboat

Have you ever got bored with the Retrospective meeting? I have, sometime. Most of the times, this meeting just goes traditionally by answering three questions: "What good things have we done? What bad things have we done? And, what actions should we improve?" Ever and ever again! My team found a way to make it a little bit more exciting. The idea is that each member - not only our Scrum Master - will become a host. If a meeting is hosted by a memeber, the next meeting will be hold by another one.

Yeah, I used "Sailboat" pattern in my turn. So, I just want to share with you guys how it was.

I started the meeting by telling a short story that I hoped everyone in my team could recall the meaning behind of Retrospective meetings:

There is a group of people trying pick up trash in a park. At the first look, the park seem not to have a lot of trash because they are spread out all over the place. However, these people continuously found trash when they started. They kept picking them up until the whole park is clean.

What exactly I did mean from this story is "just keep improving". In my opition, Retrospective is the time for us to look back what "trash" are found and try to eliminate them continuously.

Next, I drew a picture about sailing boat as a metaphor for the team. (The following is my own painting; it took me nearly one hour to complete. Haha!)

All parts of this picture are numberd from 1 to 5 with my explaination below:

[1]. Sailing boat: the team

[5]. Happy island: Sprint goal (or team's goal in general)

[2]. Wind: motivator - what moves the boat forward

[3]. Anchor: impediment - what slows the boat down

[4]. Rock: pitfall - what dangerous things are able to stop the boat

Whole members thought about it in 5 minutes, then I picked a member randomly to talk about her/his own opinions. Next, this member again selected randomly another one.

Thanks to this visualized method, I saw the meeting went more exciting with a lot of issues were discussed easily.

Comments

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...

Set up a web server for learning HTTP headers

Motivation We all follow the client-server model using the HTTP protocol for most of our web apps today. In development, we simply may have a backend API server and a frontend (web pages or mobile apps) only. However, it seemed that a proxy server is always required for production. In fact, most of the hardest issues in production come from integration. The requests and responses might be modified by the proxy server. Therefore, the understanding of HTTP protocol is one of the key skills to resolve those issues. I wanted to dive deep into HTTP with some core concepts such as caching, cookies, and CORS. I didn't intend to go quickly rather than moved slowly to have a well understanding of what I do. Prepare a server The easiest way is to use my laptop as a server then I can just use "localhost". I can also use ngrok to make my web server online. Finally, I use an online tool such as RedBot to check the HTTP headers. To make it more excited though, I deployed the app on A...

MS SQL Server Views

"Creates a virtual table whose contents (columns and rows) are defined by a query. Use this statement to create a view of the data in one or more tables in the database. For example, a view can be used for the following purposes: - To focus, simplify, and customize the perception each user has of the database. - As a security mechanism by allowing users to access data through the view, without granting the users permissions to directly access the underlying base tables. - To provide a backward compatible interface to emulate a table whose schema has changed." [1] Beside that, our team used view in order to improve the performance of our web apps when a database has a very complicated relationship between its tables by using ORM Frameworks such as Hibernate. Example code: --create CREATE VIEW placeholders AS SELECT EMPKEY AS empkey, CONNUMB AS connumb, EMPNBR AS empNbr, ACEEMPN AS empFirstName, ACEEMPFN AS empLastName, EMPNAM AS empFullName, ...

Java Core - Top 10 Questions Every Developer Should Know

#RandomlyPickedByMe What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer? Why do I get "SomeType@a3fde" when I print my code? Why is String immutable? Why "equals" method when we have "==" operator? Is List<Dog> a subclass of List<Animal>? Why shouldn't we use raw type? Is Java “pass-by-reference” or “pass-by-value”? What's the advantage of a Java enum versus a class with public static final fields? Why "double x = 0.1 + 0.2" and result of print(x) is 0.30000000000000004? 1. What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Holy crap! (Vietnamese: Thế quái nào lại có câu hỏi ngớ ngẩn vậy chứ?) "Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet are similar." - Greg Hewgill (on StackOverflow) 2. Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer String is immutable. StringBuilder and StringBuffer are mutable. StringBuffer is thread-safe. String...

The power of acceptance test

User Story is the place PO gives his ideas about features so that developers are able to know what requirements are. Acceptance tests are these show the most valuable things of the features represented by some specific cases. Usually PO defines them, but not always. Therefore, refining existing acceptance tests – even defining new ones that cover all features of the User Story must be a worth task. Acceptance test with Given When Then pattern If we understand what we are going to do, we can complete it by 50% I have worked with some members those just start implementing the features one by one and from top to down of the User Story description. Be honest, I am the one used to be. What a risky approach! Because it might meet a case that is very easy to miss requirements or needs to re-work after finding any misunderstood things. I have also worked with some members those accept spending a long time to clarify the User Story. Reading carefully of whole User Story by defining...

vhandit

Search This Blog