It seems to be a common understanding that retrospectives are the major practice that enables agility. However, conducting virtual retrospectives is often not straight forward. One possibility is to conduct a retrospective at each site and then to swap the different findings afterwards. Another one is to facilitate a joint virtual retrospective using different virtual communication channels. In this workshop we will explore practices and facilitation techniques that have helped in different global projects. Moreover we’ll indicate supporting tools and how to prepare such a workshop.

A lot of people still believe that agile software development is for small and collocated teams only. However, the agile value system and the principles as stated in the manifesto don’t argue about project size and distribution. In this course attendees will learn about key success factors for distributed (and maybe even large-scale) agile software development. The focus will be on how to apply agile processes in a distributed setting and how to establish and preserve a common development culture.