Agile Retrospectives

Preface

When we say retrospective, here’s what we have in mind: a special meeting where the team gathers after completing an increment of work to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork. Retrospectives enable whole-team learning, act as catalysts for change, and generate action. Retrospectives go beyond checklist project audits or perfunctory project closeouts. And, in contrast to traditional postmortems or project reviews, retrospectives focus not only on the development process, but on the team and team issues. And team issues are as challenging as technical issues—if not more so.

We have been leading retrospectives and teaching others to lead retrospectives for a combined twenty years. In fact, in 2003, we were bestowed with the title Retrospective Goddesses at the annual Retrospective Facilitators Gathering in Baden, Austria. It’s not every day you get to read a book written by a pair of goddesses! Although we don’t really claim divinity, we do know lots about helping teams learn together in retrospectives.

We’ve talked to people who claim that retrospectives are a waste of time. When we probe for details, the process they describe doesn’t resemble what we would call a retrospective. However, when people follow a process similar to what we describe in this book, we’ve seen solid, bottom-line results.

Our clients and colleagues tell us that they see benefits from retrospectives, too. Here’s some of what we’ve seen and heard. In each case the team identified improvements ...