Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

See how to mine the experience of your software development team continually throughout the life of the project. The tools and recipes in this book will help you uncover and solve hidden (and not-so-hidden) problems with your technology, your methodology, and those difficult “people” issues on your team.

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems”) are only helpful at the end of the project–too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today.

Now, Derby and Larsen show you the tools, tricks, and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You’ll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes, and how to scale these techniques up. You’ll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project–not just at the end.

With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Helping Your Team Inspect And Adapt
Chapter 2. A Retrospective Custom-Fit To Your Team
Chapter 3. Leading Retrospectives
Chapter 4. Activities To Set The Stage
Chapter 5. Activities To Gather Data
Chapter 6. Activities To Generate Insights
Chapter 7. Activities To Decide What To Do
Chapter 8. Activities To Close The Retrospective
Chapter 9. Releases And Project Retrospectives
Chapter 10. Make It So
Appendix A1. Facilitation Supplies
Appendix A2. Debriefing Activities
Appendix A3. Activities Quick Reference Matrix
Appendix A4. Resources For Learning Facilitation Skills
Appendix A5. Bibliography