Agile Retrospectives

Chapter 1 Helping Your Team Inspect and Adapt

Retrospectives help teams—even great ones—keep improving. In this chapter, we’ll start with an example of an hour-long iteration retrospective. We’ll watch what the retrospective leader does, and then we’ll analyze the example so you can apply the process to your retrospectives.

Let’s peek in on a team who writes financial software as they hold their retrospective at the end of a two-week iteration. This team rotates leadership of the retrospective, and this week, it’s Dana’s turn to lead.

After all the team members are seated in a semicircle facing a large white board with several posters at one end, Dana starts the retrospective.

“Here we are again, taking time to examine our work in the last iteration. We have an hour blocked to focus on our teamwork and methods. It’s 4 PM now; we should be finished by 5. This time, we’re going to focus on our development processes, because we’ve noticed that the number of defects is increasing.”

“Before we look at the data, let’s do a quick check-in: in a word or two, what’s going on for you as we start this retrospective?”

Each of the six team members gave a short response. “I’m puzzled,” said the first.

“Curious,” said the second.

“Bummed about the defects,” answered the third.

“Hey, that’s more than a word or two!” said the first team member and gave the wordy team member ...