Micro Book Review: Agile Retrospectives, making good teams great

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Title: Agile Retrospectives, making good teams great
Author: Esther Derby / Diana Larsen
Pages: 165

What the book is about
The book is about leading retrospectives. Retrospectives came into fashion with agile software development, especially Scrum has retrospectives every sprint. The beginning of the book motivates retrospectives, explains them, shows how to lead them and establishes the concept of phases: set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, close the retrospective. The second part explains detailed several activities you can use in each phase. A description is structured like the famous design pattern book: Purpose, Time needed, Description, Steps, Materials and Preperation and Examples.

What I’ve learned from the book

• Retrospectives have several phases: set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, close the retrospective
• There are many activities for retrospectives, you should change activities from time to time
• Use an activity like”appraisals” for closing a retrospective

Should you buy this book?
Yes, highly recommended

Who should buy the book

• Every ScrumMaster or Iteration Manager
• Everyone who leads retrospectives

Notes
Book bought by myself due to a mentioning on Twitter.

I’ve chosen the micro review format because it lends itself to be used as a future micro format and I like short reviews myself. You can read the table of contents elsewhere, I don’t like it when reviews iterate the content.

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