Lone Star Software Symposium: Austin
July 26 - 28, 2019
Data-Driven Retros in Practice
Friday - Jul 26 3:15 PM CDT - BLUEBONNET
How does your team decide what's the most important problem to solve?
When we ask a question like “what's the biggest problem?“, it doesn't mean the biggest problems will come to mind. Instead, we're biased to think about what's bothered us most recently, annoyances, or pet peeves. It's really easy to spend tons of time working on improvements that make little difference.
But what if we had data that pointed us to the biggest problems across the team?
In this session, we'll dig into the data from a 1-month case study tracking Idea Flow Metrics, and discuss the patterns of friction during development, and how to identify the biggest opportunities for improvement with data.
Arty Starr
Developer Experience Researcher, University of Victoria
About Arty Starr
Arty Starr has been a software engineer for 20+ years and is a researcher and pioneer of new theories of the developer's cognitive experience that help us recognize how developers' experiences are changing with AI. Her theories of developer momentum and troubleshooting help us see software development through an ecological lens, recognizing it as a living activity in motion and the living capacities of care and cognition that support this motion. Her aim is to bring heart, human-centric values, and agency to the craft of software development so we can build toward the type of world we want to live in. With richer perception and by recognizing what matters, we can light a path to a future of thriving habitats where humans and AI can collaborate well and thrive together.
Arty is the author of Idea Flow, a speaker, thought leader, and artist who loves mixing ideas across disciplines into a fusion of creativity to help make the world a better place through her projects.