Week 6: Reading Week and Retrospective

Week 6 marks the midpoint of the module, which sounds strange seeing as I feel like I have learned so much already! This is apparently a reading week, but as it straddles the first rapid ideation session there is little time to relax. I'm behind with the prototyping but I'm guessing readers will already be aware of this as I think that the complete journal entry for that will be under week 5 and go out before this. I need to get a handle on these journal entries and possibly make a specific couple of nights a week to dedicate to them. Looking at my peers I think they have structured their journals far better than I have. They appear to have a dedicated post per week just for reflections, whereas I seem to be peppering my reflections in each post I write.

I plan to find some time this week to look into Discord some more as identified in last week's post on SMART Goals. I feel like I am missing valuable interaction with peers.

Retrospective

One of the main points we were suggested to look at this week was a retrospective. The course resources go on to reference Mike Cohn - a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance - suggests the “stop, start, and continue” methods for conducting a retrospective (Cohn, 2016). This was extremely coincidental as I went through a similar process at work this week. The idea is to reflect over a prolonged period of development to see areas of improvement, including areas to stop doing, things to start doing, and things to continue doing.

Things I should start doing

• Read more around the subjects set each week

• Start interacting more with my Cohorts on Discord

• Exploring the possibility of using Gaming mechanics and tools in my prototyping

• Be more concise with my journal entries

• setting fixed times for studying and leisure time.

• Quality control on some of my journal entries before publishing

Things I should stop doing

• Becoming bogged down on the details

• Stressing about the final artifact, instead of focusing on the takeaways

• Stop comparing myself to my cohorts so much.

• Working late into the night on journal entries, challenges, and Rapid Ideations

Things I should continue doing

• Being active on spark forums and Webinar sessions

• Taking the opportunity in this first module to experiment with as many techniques as possible

• Dedicating as much as I can to improving my practice

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References

Cohn, M., 2016. A Simple Way to Run a Sprint Retrospective. [online] Mountain Goat Software. Available at: <https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/a-simple-way-to-run-a-sprint-retrospective#author> [Accessed 1 March 2022].