CSCI 373: A Course Retrospective
Michael A. Heroux
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?
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 groups:
a. 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.
b. Collect
individual responses to each of the above three questions for each activity in
your group document.
c. Discuss
individual responses as a group and synthesize your responses for the third
question for each activity.