What does a great engineering retrospective look like?
In my last article, I wrote about cultivating an engineering process that really works for your team. I brought up retrospectives as a key tool for doing this, a mechanism for your team to discuss what’s working and what isn’t so that they can decide what adjustments they’d like to make.
But that’s a very tactical view of what a retrospective is and does. Retrospectives can and should be so much more. If your engineering process is the heartbeat of your engineering team, your team’s retrospectives are its soul.
A brief history of retrospectives
While it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact origin for the idea of retrospectives, the ‘reflection workshops’ popularized by Alistair Cockburn in his 1998 book, Surviving Object-Oriented Projects is one obvious candidate.
