Introduction
This book contains many exercises that you can use to facilitate retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives.
Agile retrospectives are a great way to continuously improve the way of working. Getting feasible actions out of a retrospective and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. We hope that this book helps you and your teams to conduct retrospectives effectively and efficiently to reflect upon your ways of working, and continuously improve them!
This book starts with two chapters that provide answers to the questions What Is an Agile Retrospective? and Why Do We Do Retrospectives? These answers help you to understand the purpose of retrospectives and to motivate people to do them.
The chapter Business Value of Agile Retrospectives explains why organizations should invest in retrospectives and what they can do to get more business value out of them.
The Retrospective Pre-Requirements chapter describes how you can prepare your organization for doing retrospectives and discusses the skills that retrospectives facilitators need to have.
The chapter Designing a Retrospective explains why you need different exercises for retrospectives, how you can design a retrospective that is valuable for a team given their situation, and what you can do to develop your own toolbox of exercises.
The main part of this book is the chapter with many practical Retrospective Exercises that you can use to lead retrospectives with your teams. Any time you are running a retrospective and you do not know what exercise to use you can pick one of the many exercises from this chapter.
The chapter Benefits of Retrospectives gives you ideas about what agile teams can expect to get out of doing them.
Adopting Agile Retrospectives describes what you can do to introduce retrospectives in your organization and how you can improve the way that you do them.
In the chapter A Retrospectives Book in Your Language we have listed the different language editions of this book that are available to help teams all around the world to do valuable agile retrospectives.
The last chapter provides useful information if you want to stay up to date on doing Valuable Agile Retrospectives.
Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives doesn’t intend to teach you the theory behind retrospectives. For that purpose there are books like Agile Retrospectives from Esther Derby and Diana Larsen and Project Retrospectives from Norman Kerth (see the Bibliography for a full list of books and links).
With plenty of exercises for your personal retrospective toolbox, this book will help you to become more proficient in doing retrospectives and to get more out of them.