Join Certified Scrum Trainer® John McFadyen for a 12-part video series exploring the scrum event known as the sprint retrospective. Throughout the series, he’ll share tips and tricks for creating impactful, engaging, and effective sprint retrospectives for your teams.
The final tip for running a sprint retrospective like a pro is to read the book Retrospective Antipatterns by Aino Corry, 2020. This is a great book for learning the antipatterns that can occur when facilitating the retrospective meeting.
McFayden says he’s a big fan of learning from other people’s mistakes. Understanding patterns is a really powerful tool to have in your retrospective toolbox, and an antipattern is actually a solution to a problem.
This book describes a lot of antipatterns with retrospectives and techniques that other scrum masters have used to facilitate them, and why they haven’t worked, so you can avoid making the same mistake.
By reading this book, you can fine-tune the way you’re conducting retrospectives. Reading and reflecting on your work as a scrum master helps you improve so that your team continues to improve.
Here’s a brief description of the book:
Using the familiar “patterns” approach, Retrospectives Antipatterns introduces antipatterns related to structure, planning, people, distributed teams, and more. Corry shares traps she's encountered and mistakes she's made over more than a decade of leading retrospectives and then presents proven solutions. With her insights and guidance, you can run enjoyable retrospectives that deliver concrete improvements and real value—or at the very least recognize when you are making the same mistake as the author!
You’ll learn to:
- Create a common language, actionable solutions, and proven plans for solving the retrospective problems you'll encounter most often.
- Recognize symptoms, assess tradeoffs, and refactor your current situation into something better.
- Plan more effectively: decide who should attend and facilitate, when to schedule your retrospective, and how much time to set aside.
- Handle “people” problems: deal with negativity, silence, distrust, disillusionment, loudmouths, and cultural differences.
- Facilitate better “virtual” retrospectives, with tips for online retrospectives included in each antipattern.
Need to watch any of the other videos in the series? Find the links below!
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