Agile Retrospectives

Introduction

Suppose you are a member of a software development team. You’re doing good work, but not great work. You’re starting to see signs of interpersonal friction on the team, and some people you would like to retain on the team are dusting off their résumés. You know you need to adapt your practices and ease the interpersonal tension before things get worse. You want to introduce retrospectives to your team.

Maybe you are a team lead, and you’ve heard about retrospectives but have never tried one. You’ve heard retrospectives can help teams perform better, but you’re not sure where to start.

Maybe you’ve been holding retrospectives for months, and your team isn’t coming up with any new ideas. You need a way revitalize your retrospectives so the team doesn’t lose the gains they’ve made.

Whatever the reason you’ve picked up this book, we assume you think retrospectives might help your team. Whether you’re a coach, a team member, or a project manager and whether you’re expected to lead retrospectives after every iteration or are initiating retrospectives for the first time, you’ll find ideas and techniques that you can apply to your situation.

Our main focus in this book is short retrospectives—retrospectives that occur after one week to one month of work. Whether you are using Agile methods or more traditional incremental or iterative development, your team has an opportunity to reflect at the end of every increment and identify changes and improvements that will ...