What do you think?
Rate this book
The Retrospective Handbook: A guide for agile teams
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 eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams. It offers you practice 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
This book condenses down eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams. It offers you practice 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
ebook
First published August 1, 2012
7 people are currently reading
317 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 17, 2013
Good resource and reference material with plenty of links to other great resources. Well organized and well written.
December 17, 2012
Patrick Kua's The Retrospective Handbook A guide for agile teams is about retrospectives, covering the fundamentals, the preparation, the actual process with a focus on facilitation (the manager/master of the session), the conclusion, and the post-process maintenance. The book also includes chapters for starters, for process analysts, and for people looking for related processes. In theory, $20 well-spent. In practice, the book was disappointing, by far the worst book I've read all year.
Side-story: I am currently very interested in the lower management of research, so I'm currently reading about team management, project management, and design processes that do not limit creativity. Among the potentially useful tools, I bumped into retrospective. The books with the best reviews, Norman L. Kerth's Project Retrospectives; and Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, and Ken Schwaber's Agile Retrospectives Making Good Teams Great; were not available in Kindle format so I picked the highest ranked book on Goodreads.
Why was the book so disappointing? I will start with the content, then proceed to presentation.
Although the book starts with numerous guiding questions that seem very useful and to the point, the actual content is surprisingly unclear and uninformative. Kua leaves much of the key material, such as the actual retrospective process or the list of activities, to resources outside the book. Moreover, the references are too few: only three books (two of which are Norman L. Kerth's and Esther Derby et al.) and four web sites (this time it's Diana Larsen's blog). Surprisingly much text---three paragraphs---is spent on the recommendation to use thick markers rather than ball-tip pens, and on arguing against the use of red markers on orange papers. In contrast, there are very few examples and rarely spanning more than one paragraph each. Uniquely useless!
The analytical part is both insufficient and poor. I was left with many, many questions, some of which are:
- What makes retrospectives different from project post-mortems and lessons learnt?
- What makes personal retrospectives different from reflection? (The author fleetingly mentions reflection, long after the discussion about personal retrospection.)
- What makes agile retrospectives agile? Why are local retrospectives easier and/or more efficient than distributed retrospectives? (The author's claim for an explanation ends at
I feel that retrospectives where all participants are in the same physical location will always be more effective than when some participants are located elsewhere.
(Kua, Patrick (2012-08-21). The Retrospective Handbook: A guide for agile teams (Kindle Locations 785-786). Leanpub. Kindle Edition.)
- Why does the Fishbowl Discussion activity achieve its stated goal, that is, to quickly engage large groups in conversation? (About this activity, the author just presents a method in three paragraphs.)
- What is a practical example of setting just enough goals? How many goals? What kind of theme (e.g., by size of goals, by direction of goals, by type of possible solution, by product, etc.)?
- How does the trade-off time-quality work when trying to ensure that each action point resulting from a retrospective adheres to SMART? (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.)
The presentation, especially for such a short book, is very poor. I am surprised this book passed the editorial process as-is, because structuring, plain writing, and e-book formatting are each raising numerous and significant issues. Despite the frequent sectioning---sub-sections take about two pages each---, the structure looks more like an information dump rather than a well-thought element: there is little cross-referencing between sections, frequent duplication (with different words), and dangling paragraphs that belong elsewhere. The writing includes typos, is wordy (for a 100-page document this is a killer), and very vague. The formatting makes reading difficult, especially as the references are poorly named (why [DERBY100], and not [Derby], or [Derby, 2006], or [1], or ... ?!); inconsistently used as footnotes or inline URLs; and misplaced (footnotes are 3-4 paragraphs later, which puts them on a different page even on my large-format Kindle DX).
Overall, this is the worst book I've read this year.
Side-story: I am currently very interested in the lower management of research, so I'm currently reading about team management, project management, and design processes that do not limit creativity. Among the potentially useful tools, I bumped into retrospective. The books with the best reviews, Norman L. Kerth's Project Retrospectives; and Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, and Ken Schwaber's Agile Retrospectives Making Good Teams Great; were not available in Kindle format so I picked the highest ranked book on Goodreads.
Why was the book so disappointing? I will start with the content, then proceed to presentation.
Although the book starts with numerous guiding questions that seem very useful and to the point, the actual content is surprisingly unclear and uninformative. Kua leaves much of the key material, such as the actual retrospective process or the list of activities, to resources outside the book. Moreover, the references are too few: only three books (two of which are Norman L. Kerth's and Esther Derby et al.) and four web sites (this time it's Diana Larsen's blog). Surprisingly much text---three paragraphs---is spent on the recommendation to use thick markers rather than ball-tip pens, and on arguing against the use of red markers on orange papers. In contrast, there are very few examples and rarely spanning more than one paragraph each. Uniquely useless!
The analytical part is both insufficient and poor. I was left with many, many questions, some of which are:
- What makes retrospectives different from project post-mortems and lessons learnt?
- What makes personal retrospectives different from reflection? (The author fleetingly mentions reflection, long after the discussion about personal retrospection.)
- What makes agile retrospectives agile? Why are local retrospectives easier and/or more efficient than distributed retrospectives? (The author's claim for an explanation ends at
I feel that retrospectives where all participants are in the same physical location will always be more effective than when some participants are located elsewhere.
(Kua, Patrick (2012-08-21). The Retrospective Handbook: A guide for agile teams (Kindle Locations 785-786). Leanpub. Kindle Edition.)
- Why does the Fishbowl Discussion activity achieve its stated goal, that is, to quickly engage large groups in conversation? (About this activity, the author just presents a method in three paragraphs.)
- What is a practical example of setting just enough goals? How many goals? What kind of theme (e.g., by size of goals, by direction of goals, by type of possible solution, by product, etc.)?
- How does the trade-off time-quality work when trying to ensure that each action point resulting from a retrospective adheres to SMART? (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.)
The presentation, especially for such a short book, is very poor. I am surprised this book passed the editorial process as-is, because structuring, plain writing, and e-book formatting are each raising numerous and significant issues. Despite the frequent sectioning---sub-sections take about two pages each---, the structure looks more like an information dump rather than a well-thought element: there is little cross-referencing between sections, frequent duplication (with different words), and dangling paragraphs that belong elsewhere. The writing includes typos, is wordy (for a 100-page document this is a killer), and very vague. The formatting makes reading difficult, especially as the references are poorly named (why [DERBY100], and not [Derby], or [Derby, 2006], or [1], or ... ?!); inconsistently used as footnotes or inline URLs; and misplaced (footnotes are 3-4 paragraphs later, which puts them on a different page even on my large-format Kindle DX).
Overall, this is the worst book I've read this year.
August 2, 2013
Obligatory, for Scrum Masters/Iteration Managers or Facilitators. This is a great guide how to run retrospectives. I think it is a great start to understand facilitator skills. And It is a short book, just 126 pages! Easy to read in a week.
August 10, 2012
Quick read, lots of useful and practical advice. And I think also very interesting for the facilitated. So I would recommend this also to non-facilitators.
January 27, 2015
A fairly basic book about retrospectives.
The main goal of the book is not to provide the user with tons of techniques and ideas but rather provide a starting point for teams willing to start having retrospectives.
Pat shares the basis for a retrospective along with his experiences.
Esther Derby's Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great provides a more structured and longer description about retrospectives but also contains fewer examples and "real" world problems one may face.
The book is a good read for those who are not used to run retrospectives and would like to start doing so in an enterprise environment where the culture is not yet established.
The main goal of the book is not to provide the user with tons of techniques and ideas but rather provide a starting point for teams willing to start having retrospectives.
Pat shares the basis for a retrospective along with his experiences.
Esther Derby's Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great provides a more structured and longer description about retrospectives but also contains fewer examples and "real" world problems one may face.
The book is a good read for those who are not used to run retrospectives and would like to start doing so in an enterprise environment where the culture is not yet established.
March 21, 2014
This is a useful companion to Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Kua's book has a bit of extra information on distributed retrospectives, and addresses many of the concerns of 'internal facilitators' -- scrum masters and the like who are part of the team, and also in the facilitator role. I was a but concerned when I read in the intro that he wrote this book because he didn't find other resources, since Derby/Larsen book had been around for a while, but the multiple references in this book to other resources (books, papers, and online resource) reduced my anxiety. Get the Agile Retrospectives book first, as that has more actionable information, and consider this one to help improve your logistics.
January 4, 2014
The Retrospective Handbook by Patrick Kua provides practical information about how to prepare and facilitate retrospectives.
It helps you to think about how to do the retrospective, plan it, and arrange all the materials that are needed.
The book contains lot's of tips to facilitate an effective and efficient retrospective.
It helps you to think about how to do the retrospective, plan it, and arrange all the materials that are needed.
The book contains lot's of tips to facilitate an effective and efficient retrospective.
September 23, 2015
Good practical overview how to run retrospectives
This book provides a great overview of how to run good retrospectives and meetings in general. While all the recommendations and tips on there are very apt and useful I've found it a bit too practical and general. Most chapters are applicable to any form of meeting (which is good) but I would have loved a deeper dive into the psychological challenges and things to look out for with retrospectives.
This book provides a great overview of how to run good retrospectives and meetings in general. While all the recommendations and tips on there are very apt and useful I've found it a bit too practical and general. Most chapters are applicable to any form of meeting (which is good) but I would have loved a deeper dive into the psychological challenges and things to look out for with retrospectives.
July 9, 2014
Good addition to the list of books on retrospectives, most useful for a beginning facilitator. Its strongest point is the chapter on distributed retrospectives.
I find the kindle version expensive when I compare it to other books in the same price range.
I find the kindle version expensive when I compare it to other books in the same price range.
March 11, 2014
A thin book ~1 hour of mandatory reading for anyone who facilitates agile retrospectives. The book describes basic rules for leading retrospectives and a lot of useful practical tips helping keep retrospectives effective.
August 16, 2012
Only just started, and already learned something...
August 21, 2012
Very nice book with lots of good advices on running great agile retrospective meetings.
January 16, 2014
It is a book about facilitating group activities.
October 31, 2014
daudz praktisku, noderīgu padomu, īpaši iesācējiem kā es.
June 6, 2015
Basic book, but well written. Worth the read.
February 6, 2015
An excellent book with loads of great advice for conducting retrospectives.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews