Retrospectives are (or at least should be) an important part of a team’s life, be it an agile one or not. The book “Agile Retrospectives” by Esther Derby (of “Behind Closed Doors” fame) and Diana Larsen aims to get you and your team going with them. In an “agile” team where you’d work in iterations, a retrospective should take place after each one, and ideally after the project’s done. The latter would be the case for teams working with more classical end-to-end development approaches.
The book starts out by describing how to approach a retrospective, assuming you’ve never done one before, taking into account things like timing, group dynamics and structuring. The main part of retrospectives are activities. That doesn’t mean just doing something, but achieving something. An activity is always related to a specific goal, e.g. identifying problems. You wanna keep retrospectives interesting. That’s why this book introduces a lot of possible activities which you can adapt or change more to your liking (or team, for that matter). The next about 90 pages list activities you can do in each stage of a retrospectives.
The stages basically split a retrospective into parts into beginning, end, and the stuff in between, the latter being data-gathering, generating insights and deciding what to do. There are different ways to achieve these goals, and the book describes a lot of them in a sadly not-so-glory detail. The list of activities is exhaustive, but each one doesn’t go into much detail. It’s basically a list of things to say or do, and how to deal with certain situations that might come up.
Though some of them come along with examples from real or invented teams, in my opinion there are too few examples going into insufficient detail. “Behind Closed Doors” lives from the story it was built around. I miss that here.
The rest of the book does a good job explaining in a more suitable detail, but the list of activities might get a little dry, since some of the activities are variations or build on others. I’m aware that it’s supposed to be a reference you can get back to, but even then a little bit more information or examples couldn’t hurt.
“Agile Retrospectives” is a good reference to get back to when you plan a retrospective for your or another team. It’s a manual, which is good and bad at the same time. It contains all the information you need to get going, but it doesn’t tell you how to do it in every nitty-gritty detail. You’ll have to figure out the details yourself. And if that was the authors’ intention in the first place, they did a good job. If you thought about getting started with retrospectives in your team I’d recommend getting the book and reading the all the stuff around the activities, maybe some examples of the latter. When you start planning a retrospective, come back to the book and skim through the activities to find the ones you’d like to include in your retrospective.
One last thing: Why the name “Agile Retrospectives”? Though constant self- and team-improvement is an important part of agile teams, using the Agile brand is unnecessary here. A title like “Effective Retrospectives” would be more fitting, since retrospectives aren’t agile-only, and in the end running effective retrospectives is what the book is all about.