 |
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
Customer Reviews: 1 Average Customer Rating:  Write a Review and tell the world about this title! People who purchase this book frequently purchase: Books on similar topics, in best-seller order:Books from the same publisher, in best-seller order:
See how to mine the experience of your software development team continually
throughout the life of the project. The tools and recipes in this book will help
you uncover and solve hidden (and not-so-hidden) problems with your technology,
your methodology, and those difficult "people" issues on your team.
Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong
on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as "post-mortems")
are only help at the end of the project--too late to help. You need agile retrospectives
that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems
to help the team today.
Now Esther and Diana show you the tools, tricks and tips you need to fix the
problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You'll
see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically
for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the
needed changes and how to scale these techniques up. You'll learn how to deal
with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project--not
just at the end.
With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.
About the Author
Diana Larsen partners with leaders of software development projects to improve
project performance, support and sustain change, and build collaborative workplaces.
Diana serves on the boards of Agile Alliance and the Pacific Northwest Software
Quality Conference, participates in planning for the XP 200x and Agile 200x
conferences, and speaks at several software conferences every year. She's written
articles for Software Development, At Work, Cutter IT Journal, and Cutter's
Executive Update and e-Advisor series. Diana is a founder of the Annual International
Retrospective Facilitators Gathering.
Customer Reviews
Customer Reviews: 1 Average Customer Rating: Sep 24, 2006 Mike Cohn (mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com) from Boulder, CO
Great advice for more frequent, shorter, better retrospectives
One of the challenges facing an agile team that holds a retrospective at the end of each one- to four-week iteration is how to keep the meetings fresh. When done this often retrospectives become redundant and team members often simply go through the motions. This is an excellent book that is full of so many ideas on how to conduct a retrospective that they will never become redundant. I really like how the book is structured. It starts with three chapters about the purpose of retrospectives, how to tailor one for your team, and how to lead one. A general framework for retrospectives is laid out (gather data, generate insights, make decisions, and so on). The remaining chapters delve into these topics and each presents a variety of ways to perform the step. I picked up some wonderful ideas in these chapters that I have been able to successfully apply. Im not a big fan of the grueling multi-day retrospectives commonly held after a year (or more) of work on a big bang-style, waterfall project. This book perfectly fills a need, describing how to run much shorter and more effective retrospectives on a more frequent basis. I highly recommend it.
|
|
