I'm pleased to announce the publication of our book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: A Toolbox of Retrospective Exercises! With plenty of exercises for your personal retrospective toolbox, Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives will help you to become more proficient in doing retrospectives and to get more out of them.
Agile promotes that teams work in a sustainable pace, delivering value for their customers. When teams are working under too much pressure, technical debt will increase and velocity of teams will go down. Agile retrospectives can help you to discover the causes of pressure, and to take actions to reach a sustainable pace with your teams.
Buy-in from professionals is crucial to make changes succeed in organizations. Many improvement programs fail when professionals are insufficiently involved during the changes. Agile retrospectives can be used to do continuous and lasting improvements in organizations.
Adopting retrospectives is an organizational change where professionals adapt their way of working, their behavior. It won't just happen, and if not properly supported it may take much time, or even fail. You have to make clear what the purpose of retrospectives, and set up a team of capable retrospective facilitators. Then start doing them with your agile teams, and reflect on how they are going. This will get retrospectives introduced and accepted by your teams, leading to continuous improvement!
Software development organizations need to become more agile and lean, to deliver products that satisfy the needs of their customers. An agile approach where you change your way of working in small directed steps is often the most effective way to implement agile. Are you ready to go on an Agile trip?
Agile retrospectives can be used by teams to inspect and adapt the way of working. Here's an introduction to agile retrospectives, to help you to get started with them.
Another technique for Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives is "Asking Why?". "Why" is one of the most valuable question that I use in retrospectives. It gives insight in peoples behavior and their feelings and motives that drive them, helps to find root causes of problems, and reveal the strengths that people have. And helps teams to see common goals, and find ways to collaboratively reach them.
The book Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister has been released in a 3rd edition, and the topics addressed in it are still very important. Software development is about people: when, how and where they can work together. If you truly are concerned with people, and looking for ways to improve how you collaboratively develop and deliver software, then this book is a must read.
What can agile projects do to improve collaboration between teams, and increase their contributions in the project? Doing retrospectives of retrospectives is a way to share learnings across a project, and to solve problems that a project is facing.
How can you become an excellent team that is able to deliver and exceed customer expectations? By continuously becoming better in the things that you are doing great, using a strengths based retrospective. This technique helps teams to improve themselves by focusing on their personal and team strengths.
The 2nd blog in the series "Retrospective Benefits" explains how team benefit from retrospectives by finding those improvement actions that matter to them, and help them to do their work better. Agile retrospectives give the power to the team, where it belongs!
When you have problems that keep coming back in your sprints, you can try the five times why technique. It helps you to get to the root causes of the problems, and to define effective actions that prevent them from happening in future sprints. This is one of the retrospective technique that will be included in the Pocket Book on Agile Retrospectives, your feedback can help us to improve it!