Written on June 11, 2009 by Stephan Schmidt

Micro Book Review: Agile Retrospectives, making good teams great

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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About the author: Stephan Schmidt is head of development at brands4friends. He has more than 15 years of internet technology experience and 10 years experience in agile. He was head of development, consultant and CTO and is a speaker, author and blog writer. He specializes in organizing and optimizing software development helping companies by increasing productivity with lean software development and agile methodologies. Want to know more? All views are only his own.