Review By: Janet D. Kennedy
04/20/2007Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great brings the skills that experienced facilitators use to the realm of the technical team leader. The forward by Ken Schwaber, well-known for his work with Scrum methodology, lends credibility to the topic and should be sufficient to hold the attention of most skeptical readers. The book is well organized and informative. Following the instructions, even an inexperienced team leader can have a successful retrospective.

The techniques are described in detail, and the scenarios provide realistic examples of how things may proceed and how to deal with them. Software developers often are reticent about describing how they feel. By providing several different ways to gather information on how people feel about the work being reviewed, there is a good chance that one of the techniques will surface these important issues that influence and affect people’s daily activities.

The design of the book, including the “recipes” for techniques, makes it very useful as a quick reference. The writing style of the book is informal, as if you are being mentored by an experienced facilitator. Rather than simply saying what to do and how to do it, this book gives examples of why it is important and when to use it. The authors include simple tips such as making sure that everyone says something within the first few minutes, even if it is only a word or two, since they then will be engaged in the process.

The authors clearly have dealt with almost every situation and have done an excellent job of translating that experience into a readable reference. This book will be one that I refer to frequently, as the techniques can be applied to many situations besides agile retrospectives.