The Retrospective Handbook
The Retrospective Handbook
A guide for agile teams
About the Book
Are you running retrospectives regularly? Perhaps you run retrospectives once a week, or fortnightly. Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your retrospectives and fuelling continuous improvement in your teams? You may already find retrospectives valuable, but suspect there are ways of making them better.
This book condenses down over eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams. It offers you practical advice on how to make your retrospectives even more effective including topics such as:
- Best methods to prepare for a retrospective
- Picking just the right materials
- Facilitating retrospectives with ease
- Dealing with common retrospective smells
- Retrospectives in different contexts including distributed, large and small groups
- A checklist for preparation
- Ensuring retrospectives result in change
Read the Foreword (available in the preview) by Agile Retrospectives's author, Diana Larsen to see why this book is for you.
Hard copies now available
Prefer a hard copy (paper version) or want to give one away as a gift? Order one online at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
About the Author
Bundles that include this book
Table of Contents
- Foreword by Diana Larsen
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Retrospective Fundamentals
- 1.1 A Short History of Retrospectives
- 1.2 The Key Questions
- 1.3 A Simple Framework
- 1.4 Where to Find Activities
- 1.5 The Importance of the Prime Directive
- 1.6 The Right Context for Retrospectives
- 1.7 Complementary Improvement Practices
- 2 Preparing for Retrospectives
- 2.1 Set Aside Time to Prepare
- 2.2 Find an Appropriate Space
- 2.3 Choose the Right Materials
- 2.4 Prepare the Space
- 2.5 Right People, Right Place, Right Time
- 2.6 A Preparation Checklist
- 3 Facilitating Retrospectives
- 3.1 Independent or Non-Independent
- 3.2 Conflict of Interest
- 3.3 Be Decisive
- 3.4 Develop Your Facilitation Skills
- 3.5 Form Effective Actions
- 3.6 Spread the Retrospective Word
- 4 First-Time Facilitation Tips
- 4.1 Encourage Physical Presence
- 4.2 Seek Equal Participation
- 4.3 Avoid Doing All the Work Yourself
- 4.4 Confirm Your Understanding
- 4.5 Rephrase Blaming Statements
- 4.6 Keep the Focus on the Current Phase
- 4.7 Use a Visual Agenda
- 4.8 Use a Wide Variety of Questions
- 4.9 Observe Body Language
- 4.10 Observe Yourself
- 5 Distributed Retrospectives
- 5.1 Distributed Challenges
- 5.2 Make the Most of It
- 5.3 Focus First on Building Relationships
- 5.4 Use Video Cameras at All Ends
- 5.5 People Tokens in Remote Locations
- 5.6 Prevent Remote People ‘Going Dark’
- 5.7 Faces for Everyone
- 5.8 Use Remote Facilitators
- 5.9 Collect Input Before the Meeting
- 5.10 Use Online Tools to Share
- 5.11 Agree on a Signalling System
- 5.12 Invest in a ‘Technographer’
- 5.13 Run Remote Working Groups
- 5.14 Remote Proxies as Representatives
- 5.15 Simple Tips for Remote Communication
- 5.16 Be Aware of Cultural Dimensions
- 5.17 Distributed Retrospectives Are Always Harder
- 6 Other Flavours of Retrospectives
- 6.1 Futurespectives
- 6.2 Continuous Retrospectives
- 6.3 Very Big Retrospectives
- 6.4 Very Small Retrospectives
- 6.5 Appreciative Inquiry Retrospectives
- 6.6 Solution-Focused Goal-Driven Retrospectives
- 6.7 Dialogue Sheet Retrospectives
- 7 After the Retrospective
- 7.1 Capture the Retrospective Output
- 7.2 Make Actions Visible
- 7.3 Check Actions During Stand-Ups
- 7.4 Actively Chase Action Owners
- 7.5 Schedule Follow-Up Sessions
- 7.6 Schedule the Next Retrospective
- 7.7 Share With Other Teams
- 8 Common Retrospective Smells
- 8.1 All Talk, No Action
- 8.2 All Action, No Talk
- 8.3 Conversation Too Controlled
- 8.4 Too Repetitive
- 8.5 No Preparation
- 8.6 Too Many Goals
- 8.7 Poorly Formed Actions
- 8.8 One Person Owns All Actions
- 9 Keeping Retrospectives Fresh
- 9.1 Bring Food
- 9.2 Ask Different Questions
- 9.3 Run an Energiser
- 9.4 Vary the Activities
- 9.5 Change the Environment
- 9.6 Appeal To Other Skillsets
- 9.7 Make It Less Formal
- 10 Concluding
- 10.1 Powerful Results
- 10.2 Constant Change
- Appendix A: Retrospective Activities
- Books
- Websites
- Appendix B: Resources to Becoming a Better Facilitator
- Facilitation Resources
- Resources on Related Topics
- Appendix C: References
Authors have earned$9,708,674writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
The Leanpub 45-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 45 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
- #1
Production Haskell
Matt ParsonsAre you excited about Haskell, but don't know where to begin? Are you thrilled by the technical advantages, but worried about the unknown pitfalls? This book has you covered.
- #2
Functional Design and Architecture
Alexander GraninSoftware Design in Functional Programming, Design Patterns and Practices, Methodologies and Application Architectures. How to build real software in Haskell with less efforts and low risks. The first complete source of knowledge.
- #3
Ansible for Kubernetes
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a powerful infrastructure automation tool. Kubernetes is a powerful application deployment platform. Learn how to use these tools to automate massively-scalable, highly-available infrastructure.
- #4
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
- #5
Composing Software
Eric ElliottAll software design is composition: the act of breaking complex problems down into smaller problems and composing those solutions. Most developers have a limited understanding of compositional techniques. It's time for that to change.
- #6
Practical FP in Scala: A hands-on approach
Gabriel VolpeA practical book aimed for those familiar with functional programming in Scala who are yet not confident about architecting an application from scratch.
Together, we will develop a purely functional application using the best libraries in the Cats ecosystem, while learning about design patterns and best practices.
- #7
Tame your Work Flow
Steve Tendon and Daniel DoironDo you need a high performance enterprise governance approach improving management, execution and delivery while dealing with multiple projects/products, events, stakeholders and teams? Giving you better bottom line results, faster time to market, less work, better predictability, happier employees, and delighted clients? Then learn about TameFlow!
- #8
Invest In Digital Health - The Medical Futurist's Guide
Dr. Bertalan MeskoArtificial Intelligence and Digital Health are booming. In this book, we explain why now it's a good time to invest in Digital Health and give recommendations on where to invest by looking at the top 24 technological trends we find the most promising.
- #9
The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book
Andriy BurkovEverything you really need to know in Machine Learning in a hundred pages.
- #10
Windows 10 System Programming, Part 1
Pavel Yosifovich
Top Bundles
- #1
Growing Agile: The Complete Coach's Guide
7 Books
Growing Agile: Coach's Guide Series This bundle provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics. The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans, slides, handouts and activity... - #2
The Tester's Library
8 Books
The Tester's Library consists of eight five-star books that every software tester should read and re-read. As bound books, this collection would cost over $200. Even as e-books, their price would exceed $80, but in this bundle, their cost is only $49.99. Here are the books, and why they should be in your library: Perfect Software and Other... - #3
agile
11 Books
In this bundle, you will find 10 different agile books. They are about different aspects of being agile. - finding a job - doing coding dojo's - Retrospectives - Personal kanban - a non-typical coaching book and even a book that gives you an insight in the lives of some agile people. - #4
WTFlop 6M + HU - Beta Bundle
6 Books
- #5
Growing Agile: Coach's Guide Series
4 Books
This bundle provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics. The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans, slides, handouts and activity instructions to run a number of... - #6
Marionette.js A to Z
3 Books
Marionette.js has become a popular Backbone-based javascript library, because it helps you avoid boiler-plate code and focus on what makes your app special. But how do you get started?Whether you want to finally get started with dynamic client-side programming (like one reader did), or are an experienced front-end dev who has inherited a... - #7
Build A Better Backbone App
3 Books
The best way to learn new development skills is through experience, but that takes time you don't have.Get the best of both worlds with this bundle: you'll learn how to produce modern web applications by learning from experienced developers like Derick Bailey and David Sulc. BackboneJS is one of the favorite tools on the web today, but it... - #8
General Systems Thinker Bundle
5 Books
The General Systems Thinker Bundle is just that: a bundle of five books to advance the reader one giant step toward improved thinking, based on General Systems principles. Four of the books are the complete General Systems Series. The fifth is fictional piece which shows some general systems thinkers in action. It's a mystery in which a group of... - #9
Experiential Learning Bundle
4 Books
This bundle provides all four volumes of the popular Experiential Learning Series at a savings of $20 over the price if purchased separately. - #10
Ansible Bundle
2 Books
After getting up and running with Ansible in Jeff Geerling's Ansible for DevOps, strengthen your skills managing tens to thousands of instances and services in Amazon's AWS cloud with Yan Kurniawan's Ansible for AWS.
