Course Retrospective

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Zig Ziglar refines this idea with his own quote, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly--until you can learn to do it well.” A good habit for “continual process improvement” is to complete a retrospective any time you have come to the end of a major activity in work (and life in general).

Retrospectives, formerly known by the darker term “post-mortems,” have become popular in the Agile software development community and are healthy activity for any individual or group effort. The basic process is simple: take time to answer a few questions about your experiences in a given activity, and synthesize the results into concrete actions that can be applied the next time you are starting a similar kind of effort.

Retrospective questions:

1. What worked well for us?
2. What did not work well for us?
3. What actions can we take to improve our process going forward?

Approach:

A universally valuable approach for accurate prediction is to develop models of the entities and relationships that are elements in your decision-making process. Models help you to identify and reason about the essentials and eliminate aspects that are secondary or irrelevant.

In-class exercise:

1. Review the activities we have done in CSCI 373 throughout the semester. See the course Website and Handbook to form the complete list.
2. Using Google Docs and in small group
1. Develop the list of activities we have done this semester, include written and speaking assignments, reading/listening/viewing reflections and in-class activities and assignments.
2. Collect individual responses to each of the above three questions for each activity in your group document.
3. Discuss individual responses as a group and synthesize your responses for the third question for each activity.