Awesome Retrospectives

A retrospective is the act of a team looking back on past events and behaviours to learn from these and capture actionable items that help them improve their work, team and working environment.

Contents

• Retrospective Basics
• Retrospective Plans & Activities
• Distributed Retrospective Tools
• Books About Retrospectives
• Articles About Retrospectives

Retrospective Basics

For when you want to learn more about the basics of retrospectives:

• What is a Retrospective? - An introduction to retrospectives.
• The Retrospective Prime Directive - The key to running successful retrospectives.

Retrospective Plans & Activities

For when you need ideas for retrospective activities:

• Retromat - A large collection of activities and a planning tool which can be used to share your plan with others.
• Fun Retrospectives - A large collection of activities and ideas for retrospectives.
• loveagile.com - A small collection of retrospective activities.
• Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki - A collection of retrospective activities and their use cases.
• Hyper Island Toolbox - A collection of energizers and activities for unlocking insight and building a strong team.
• Lego Retrospective - An activity using Lego for when you have issues with some team members dominating meetings or others not leaning in.
• Safety Check - An activity for measuring how comfortable everyone feels sharing their views, useful for forming teams or when new team members join.
• Squad Health Check - An activity for visualizing what to improve that can be used across teams from Spotify.
• The Happiness Door - An activity for measuring happiness.
• Kudo Cards - A practice for continuously sharing feedback and building intrinsic motivation.
• Gamestorming - A collection of games and tools.

Distributed Retrospective Tools

For when you need to run a retrospective with a distributed team over the internet:

• Parabol - Free, open-source retrospective tool with integrations to GitHub, Jira, and Slack with commercial options available.
• TeamRetro - Commerce distributed retrospective tools with multiple activities, action tracking and automated idea grouping.
• Fun Retro - Distributed retrospective board with voting.
• Ideaboardz - Distributed retrospective board with voting and export functionality.
• Retrobot - Distributed retrospective board with a number of retrospective templates.
• ScatterSpoke - Distributed retrospective board with export functionality.
• Trello - Boards, lists, and cards.
• Google Docs - Collaborative document editing.
• Google Drawings - Collaborative drawing.
• Retrium - Commercial distributed retrospective tools with a number of retrospective activities.
• Confluence - Commercial content collaboration software with retrospective templates.
• Kudobox - Share Kudo cards on Twitter.
• Postfacto - Free, open-source and self-hosted retro tool aimed at helping remote teams.
• RetroTool - Free, simple, fun and flexible tool for remote retrospectives used by thousands of people around the world.
• Sprint Boards - Modern retrospective tool for Agile developers with support for third party services including Trello and Jira.

Books About Retrospectives

For when you want to learn more in-depth information about retrospectives:

• Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great - Esther Derby, Diana Larsen. A book on using retrospectives to improve teams.
• Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews - Norman L. Kerth. One of the earliest books on running retrospectives.
• The Retrospective Handbook - Patrick Kua. Great tips and advice for facilitating retrospectives.
• Fun Retrospectives - Paulo Caroli, Taina Caetano. A book covering a number of retrospective activities by the same people behind the site of the same name.
• Agile Retrospectives - Various authors. A bundle of 6 ebooks on retrospectives from Leanpub including Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Fun Retrospectives, Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your Retrospectives, The Retrospective Handbook, Agile Retrospective Kickstarter and Retrospectives for Organizational Change.
• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers - Dave Gray. Learn how to create an engaging and creative environment with gamestorming.
• Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method - Per Kristiansen, Robert Rasmussen. Use Lego Serious Play to improve meetings.

Articles About Retrospectives

For when you want information on specific issues or tips for improving your retrospectives:

• Inside Atlassian: Seven Steps for Better Retrospectives - Tips for structuring and facilitating retrospectives from Atlassian.
• 5 Steps to Better Agile Retrospectives - Advice on structuring retrospectives from Trello.
• Retrospective Fatigue? How to Increase Follow-Through on Action Items - Advice on getting teams to complete retrospective commitments.
• The Infinite Hows - A critique of the Five Whys technique and an alternate approach for better root cause analysis retrospectives.
• A 7-Step Agenda for Effective Retrospectives - Advice on creating a solid retrospective structure that keeps your team focused.