Paperback Edition available on Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble.

We present you: A new agile book with many exercises for facilitating retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they bring, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives.

This is a book for agile coaches, scrum masters, project managers, product managers and facilitators who already have some experience with retrospectives. 

With this book we are offering a half year of our work to the community to help teams all over the world to get better in doing retrospectives.

Want to stay informed about retrospectives and future versions of our book?

Join us at eepurl.com/Mem7H or join Luis Goncalves Monthly Webinar right here.

This book is being translated into many languages, they are all available on Leanpub.

Ben Linders & Luis Gonçalves

About the authors

We are both active bloggers at www.benlinders.com and https://luis-goncalves.com. On our blogs we share our experiences on several agile and lean topics including retrospectives.

During the years we have conducted many different kinds of retrospectives. We think that practicing different exercises helps to develop your own personal toolbox with retrospective exercises and get more value out of them. If you want to get some extra ideas you can access to Agile Retrospectives Ideas.

Notes:

• This book is also available on InfoQ: Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.
• Paperback Edition is published. Get your copy at Lulu, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

This book is filled with visualization examples for teams on how to improve collaboration and communication, as well as shaping behaviors. It is written for people and teams working within an agile software development context.

The pages within only depict examples. Nothing else. No deep theoretical explanations. No explanation of Agile or Scrum. No references to Gamification. No discussion on how the brain interprets visual input or how our behaviors are influenced by visual information. There are other books written on those topics.

The examples in this book might be perceived as if they are the best and only way of doing things. Of course that is not true. The examples are not best practice. They are only suggestions. You need to adapt them to your team’s context and needs.

This book is not intended to be read cover to cover. Browse. Jump back and forth. Pick what you like. Combine the ideas whichever way you find useful. Experiment and evaluate. Evolve or throw away.

Have fun!

This workbook contains a set of tools and techniques to help Scrum Masters, Facilitators, Agile Coaches and Agile Practitioners when Forming teams. It has been created mainly to share the artifacts and techniques that I’ve developed from what I’ve learned, the challenges that I’ve faced and how I’ve got through it when forming teams; I hope you get inspired to create your own version of these tools and I wish the techniques that I’m sharing here would bring new perspectives to your journey.

Wishing you all the best

Jesus

The book is a hands on learning experience that will cover a range of topics we feel Scrum Masters need to master. We know that being a Scrum Master is not an easy job, and we are passionate about helping people on this journey. Through being Scrum Masters ourselves for many years, and coaching many people on the journey, we have a collection of lessons and skills we believe it is vital for Scrum Masters to learn.

Our hope is that this book will be like having us as your personal coach on your journey, and fast track your learning by guiding you through these lessons each week. Just like each team is different, each Scrum Master’s journey is different, so what is most important about this book is that you try things out with your own team and in your environment. Some things we suggest might work great for you, others might be a complete disaster, that’s okay. That’s how you will learn.

This book is for anyone who is looking to improve as a Scrum Master or agile coach. Because the book is filled with exercises for you to do, it will make most sense if you have a team (or more than one) that you can try things out on. 

The book is written so that it’s applicable if you are a brand new Scrum Master or someone with 5 years experience looking to revitalise your team. We will cover a lot of the basics, but as experienced coaches we know that often going back to basics is exactly what experts need.

Agile Journeys entail changes that are varied and extensive. Each journey is unique, and is shaped by the people involved and the context in which they operate. At the same time, there are similarities that jump out and grab our attention when we look at more than one transition.

This book contains agile journey patterns the authors have encountered. We share these to help you recognize situations you may find yourself in on your own journey. Remember, you are not alone. Use the tips in this book to reinforce or counteract the patterns you see. Notice how they mesh and intertwine into a complex whole. To make the patterns easier to reference, we gave each pattern a name. We hope that the names will help us, and you, talk more clearly about our Agile Journeys, and understand each other more easily.

This catalog of patterns is by no means complete.  Undoubtedly, we will discover more patterns as we continue to observe and discuss Agile transitions. You will, too, we hope. May the collection continue to grow for as long as these patterns are helpful.

This is a book about continuous improvement in agile software development. Continuous improvement is what makes agile work. It’s at the heart of agile, whether you use Scrum, Kanban or any other agile framework.

The goal of this book is to make you aware of the importance of continuous improvement, explore how it is engrained in agile software development, and provide suggestions that you can use in your daily work to improve continuously and increase your organization's agility.

The book is a work in progress. You can buy the eBook for a discounted price as long as the book is being updated to learn more about continuous improvement. Thanks to Leanpub you will automatically receive all future versions for free :-).

Feedback on this book is very much appreciated. Please sent your suggestions, comments, ideas or questions to BenLinders@gmail.com.

Continuous Improvement is the act of continuously doing whatever helps to become better and thus more valuable - Ben Linders.