This book was a 5/5 for relevant and deep content on project retrospectives and a 3/5 on overall quality as a book, so 4/5 overall.

The target audience for this book is people running project retrospectives. It provides a wealth of material on the purpose of retrospectives, preparing for them, running them, and improving them. To a large degree, the book is targeted even more specifically at professional retrospective facilitators. The upside of this focus is that Kerth gives a broad set of tools for structuring retrospectives and discusses the trade-offs of different activities in depth.

The downside is that Kerth takes a pretty strong position on retrospectives: they should last 2-3 days (preferably 3), preferably take place offsite, and be run by someone outside of the project team. While I understand his position that, as a professional facilitator, if those requirements cannot be met, it is not likely to be worth his time to facilitate, as a lead of a team, I would have liked more discussion of how to bridge the gap between those ideal conditions and the conditions I'm likely to encounter where we don't have as much time, offsite is possible but hard, and getting an external facilitator is challenging. I suspect that even under those challenging situations, having some retrospective-like process is valuable, even if it's not as valuable as what you can do under better conditions.

Overall though, this was a valuable read for anyone interested in how to structure effective retrospectives, even if you are unlikely to have them under ideal conditions. ( )

This is the first book that I have read on retrospectives, after having seen Norm Kerth on the SM/ASM conference in 2001 presenting about retrospectives.

It's a classic, even if you do agile retrospectives, as it describes the basic concepts and ideas behind retrospectives. A must read for anybody of is working agile, and want to continuously improve the way of working! ( )