12 Steps to Running a Sprint Retrospective Like a Pro: Step 9

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.

In tip nine, McFadyen recommends reading The Retrospective Handbook by Patrick Kua. This book builds upon the 2006 book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, which has been the go-to book for scrum masters for a long time.

While The Retrospective Handbook is from 2013, many of the concepts are still applicable today. This book helps you learn from people with more experience and shares common mistakes they’ve made that you can avoid.

There’s a lot in this book about facilitating retrospectives with remote teams, which, since the pandemic, is something that most people are dealing with today.

This book is a quick and easy read, and it will help you validate your own thoughts and experiences while learning from others.

Here’s a quick summary of the book:

Are you running retrospectives regularly? Perhaps you run retrospectives once a week, or fortnightly. Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your retrospectives and fuelling continuous improvement in your teams? You may already find retrospectives valuable, but suspect there are ways of making them better. This book condenses eight years of experience working with the retrospective practice within the context of real agile teams.

You’ll learn:

• Best methods to prepare for a retrospective
• Picking just the right materials
• Facilitating retrospectives with ease
• Dealing with common retrospective smells
• Retrospectives in different contexts including distributed, large and small groups
• A checklist for preparation
• Ensuring retrospectives result in change

So if you’re looking for new retrospective ideas, make sure to give this book a read!

Need to watch any of the other videos in the series? Find the links below!

• Step 1

• Step 2

• Step 3

• Step 4

• Step 5

• Step 6

• Step 7

• Step 8

• Step 10

• Step 11

• Step 12