Agile Retrospectives

Chapter 9 Releases and Project Retrospectives

Even if your team is performing a retrospective after every iteration, there’s reason to have a retrospective after your release and at the end of the project. While iteration retrospectives focus on your team and their issues, release and project retrospectives bring a wider perspective. Release and project retrospectives include people from across the organization—people involved in beta testing, shipping, and supporting the product (among others).

Release and project retrospectives bring together people who must coordinate their work to achieve a goal—deploying software—but may have very different points of view, different missions, and different measures. When groups that cross organizational boundaries come together in a retrospective, there’s a chance for organizational learning. It’s one thing for a team to identify obstacles—policies, procedures, and practices that inhibit their progress; it’s another for the well-intentioned people behind those obstacles to see how they affect the business of building products.

In this chapter, we’ll examine how a release or project retrospective is different from an iteration retrospective—from extending the invitation to closing the session. And we’ll look at how it’s different for the retrospective leader.

A Few Definitions

Every time we visit a new organization, we calibrate our decoder rings so we understand how people are using common words that have multiple meanings.