Thanks to the 20 plus people who came to Tuesday's session on agile
retrospectives. We had some great discussions, lots of questions asked and
answered, and hopefully everyone got a good introduction to this approach.
James Ladd won a copy of the Agile Retrospectives book, and thanks to
itbooksonline.com.au for the copy.

Due to popular demand, we'll continue on the theme next month with an open
discussion on retrospectives and people's experiences.
Here's my review of the book....

When I started to review "Agile Retrospectives, making good teams great", I
was a little skeptical. I knew a lot about Esther Derby, and had met her a
few times, and Diana Larsen has a good reputation, so I was sure they would
have done their best. Agile is typically all about mentoring, watching
someone else do something. You can learn coding or other technical skills
by example, but something open ended like retrospectives, how can you learn
that from a book? I was half expecting some motherhood statements about
getting a good facilitator, having open participative sessions, etc, etc.
It wasn't until after reading it that I learnt it was voted one of the top
10 tech books of 2006. And for good reason.

The book begins with some explanatory material, and lays out their
retrospective approach: opening stage, 3 development stages, then closing
phase. There are 30 activities to choose from for the stages, which are
detailed in half the book. They suggest choosing both short and long
activities at each stage, so overruns at one stage can be balanced out with
a shorter following activity, and also having some slack time as well. Some
of the activities may be familiar, many are new. They then finish with more
explanatory material.

As well as having a great easily adoptable approach, the book has many
stories of situations that show the activities in action. There are also
examples with every activity.

The discussion covers product, process and people issues, from technical
"hard" aspects to "soft" teaming issues, with activities to cover both.
There are also lots of tips for review facilitators as well.

This is a great book for agile teams if you are running weekly to monthly
iterations, and also for any software development team, in fact for any
product development team. Buy it, apply it and make your good team great!


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]