Customer Reviews

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After the first 100 pages, I was ready to give this book a single star. Then it made its way back by producing some stimulus in the center of the book, basically talking about some techniques for eliciting and then analyzing feedback (made it back to a 4, 5 is ludicrous just from the content perspective, this thing is thin in every sense of the word). But then, it fell back to a 3 because ultimately the many examples are laid out as if they were patterns, but there is little to no structure. Finally, the conclusion section goes back to some of the silliness of the beginning. What I am referring to as silliness is the constant enveloping of process suggestions with new agey psychobabble. I found that 80% of the time, this additional stuff was noise.

Ultimately, I was left convinced (as probably all who have done iterative could easily be) that retrospectives are a good thing, but a strong conviction that they could be done better than what is being espoused here. There are a few good ideas, and the overall presentation is good. That's all.

My agile team has used retrospectives for years and thought we were pretty good at them. The activities and ideas in this well-written, well-organized book take our retrospectives to a whole new level. Now if we can't remember what we did in the previous two weeks (it's surprising how poor our memories can be!), or are stumped for ideas on how to address a prickly issue, we can just turn to the book for a way to jump-start a beneficial change.

I had no idea there were so many different approaches to getting value via retrospectives. The activities are all simple, and illustrated with many figures and examples. Even if you're not very experienced at leading these types of meetings, the book will give you confidence.

The authors also explain when and why to do different types of retrospectives. For example, I hadn't thought of having project retrospectives for our agile team, since we already have iteration retrospectives, but now I can see how they can be managed for good effect. Most importantly, the book explains how to use the information and ideas produced in a retrospective to effect real change. It's easy to get complacent and not strive to do better, and this book will help your team be proactive.

The book's organization makes it a good reference guide too. Anytime your team is in a rut or having a problem, you could pick an activity out of this book to kick start things. I love user-friendly books such as this one.

Since Norm Kerth's seminal book on Retrospectives, development cycles have gotten shorter, and many teams have gone Agile. Where Norm focuses largely on big, end-of-project retrospectives, Diana and Esther close the gap, providing an excellent set of exercises that can be done in short periods time (say, at the end of an iteration), with or without a formal facilitator. (If retrospectives are new for your team, facilitation can help you get started. If you're going to do regular retrospective, you'll probably want to learn to self-facilite.)

The healthiest team I was on did regular, short retrospectives, both for process adjustment and to keep small issues from simmering and turning in to bigger issues. Regular retros can get repetitive; the exercises in this book can help mix things up.

Diana and Esther tell us how to make good teams great. It's not hype; their advice works!

From the first few pages we know the authors are speaking from their vast experience, sharing knowledge on how to install iterative retrospectives in a team's process. Their book is written in an easy-to-read manner and leaves nothing out: it includes examples from real retrospectives, a theory of iterative retrospective design as well as a number of carefully designed exercises.

I'm not surprised that the authors could make clear such a difficult topic, blending insight from a number of fields and writing specifically for software teams. For more than a decade, Esther and Diana have been teaching the techniques and helping leading edge companies from all over the world implement retrospectives.

This is a must read book for anyone serious about making the Agile approach work, and then work better and better. Why? Because an Agile approach deployed right out of the book or course is likely to be a poor fit for your specific environment. Agile needs to be fine-tuned for your teams strengths, skills, challenges and goals. The iterative retrospective is the widely proven technique to make these crucial adjustments. There is no better book on the topic.

I have yet to regret a purchase from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. The books are clear and concise with pretty easy to implement action plans, and this one is no exception.

If you are like me, you have found that traditional "lessons learned" meetings after projects were held rarely, and a rarer number of these actually generated anything of any impact on future work. In some of my readings about Agile Software Development, I read that Agile Teams have retrospectives regularly with each iteration. I thought this was interesting, but didn't really know what to do. Enter this book.

The authors do a great job of outlining how the process should work and why each of the phases of are important. The give good coverage of

* Setting the Stage
* Gathering Information
* Generating Insights
* Deciding What to Do
* Closing the Retrospective

Not only do they explain the general process, but they give a fairly extensive list of activities to use for each phase with suggestions about which ones work in different situations. After reading this book, I was able to immediately turn around and facilitate a rertrospective for my team's latest project release.

This book is about all that you could ask for. The material is rich, but the amount of material is fairly short and quick to read. It is very focused and clear on how to take action. I would recommend investing in this book to anyone who wants to do a better job of *truly* learning from past project experience.

Project retrospectives can help educate a team by providing a clear review of what went right or wrong on a project, and why - but usually they are held at the end of a project after its completion, offering insights for the next project only. Agile retrospectives are incremental during the course of the project and can serve to strengthen courses and identify problems along the way: AGILE RETROSPECTIVES explains and explores the methodology and techniques for producing such analysis through the life of the project. Project-oriented programmers must have this.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

What a great job Esther and Diana have done to provide a tremendously valuable tool to structure retrospectives. In working with organizations, I have found the Retrospective process to be a significant step in building teams and improving on delivery capability. Having facilitated and participated in hundreds of Retrospectives I always look for ways to make them highly productive. This book is a must have for the library!

Retrospectives are an important process improvement for any team -- agile or not -- but I find that many developers haven't an appreciation for the solid benefits that this practice provides. I have always recommended Norm Kerth's Project Retrospectives, but now, in addition, I'm really, really glad to have this new reference for teams moving to agile practices. It's chock-full of seasoned advice for getting the most out of a shorter retrospective, with many new exercises and facilitation techniques. It's like having an extended conversation with two Retrospective Goddesses! Who could ask for more than that!

Does your team tune out during retrospectives? Is your team bored from weekly sessions of "what did we do well?" and "what could we do better"? This book can help.

Agile is really about building learning teams. It doesn't matter where you are at today. The crucial thing is to strive to do better next week. And the week after that. Retrospectives are the key tool we have to critically review where we are at and what we can do, as a team, to continually improve. Diana and Esther give us both a powerful structure for facilitating effective retrospectives and excellent activities to slot into that structure. The books is extremely well laid out with activities grouped into sections that provide concise descriptions of activities that you can use right away.

Using this book you can plan effective, fresh retrospectives in ten to twenty minutes.

Every agile team should have a copy of this book!

One of the challenges facing an agile team that holds a retrospective at the end of each one- to four-week iteration is how to keep the meetings fresh. When done this often retrospectives become redundant and team members often simply go through the motions. This is an excellent book that is full of so many ideas on how to conduct a retrospective that they will never become redundant.

I really like how the book is structured. It starts with three chapters about the purpose of retrospectives, how to tailor one for your team, and how to lead one. A general framework for retrospectives is laid out (gather data, generate insights, make decisions, and so on). The remaining chapters delve into these topics and each presents a variety of ways to perform the step. I picked up some wonderful ideas in these chapters that I have been able to successfully apply.

I'm not a big fan of the grueling multi-day retrospectives commonly held after a year (or more) of work on a big bang-style, waterfall project. This book perfectly fills a need, describing how to run much shorter and more effective retrospectives on a more frequent basis. I highly recommend it.