Abstract
Team-level retrospectives are widely used in agile and lean software development, yet little is known about what is actually discussed during retrospectives or their outcomes. In this paper, we synthesise the outcomes of sprint retrospectives in a large, distributed, agile software development organisation. This longitudinal case study analyses data from 37 team-level retrospectives for almost 3 years. We report the outcomes of the retrospectives, their perceived importance for process improvement and relatVed action proposals. Most discussions were related to topics close to and controllable by the team. However, the discussions might suffer from participant bias, and in cases where they are not supported by hard evidence, they might not reflect reality, but rather the sometimes strong opinions of the participants. Some discussions were related to topics that could not be resolved at the team level due to their complexity. Certain topics recurred over a long period of time, either reflecting issues that can and have been solved previously, but that recur naturally as development proceeds, or reflecting waste since they cannot be resolved or improved on by the team due to a lack of controllability or their complexity. For example, the discussion on estimation accuracy did not reflect the true situation and improving the estimates was complicated. On the other hand, discussions on the high number of known bugs recurred despite effective improvements as development proceeded.
Highlights
Retrospectives, known as ‘post-mortems’ and ‘post-project reviews’ have often been proposed as a tool for making improvements in software development activities due to their theoretical capability to generate learning and recognise the success and failure of software engineering practice (Dingsøyr 2005).Modern software development methods, such as Scrum (Schwaber and Sutherland 2011), have emphasised the role of retrospectives during the development period as opposed to after it has ended in helping enable continuous learning and process improvement
None of the studies we identified recognised the links between the different types of discussion topics and the development of corrective actions, which would be valuable for steering the discussions into constructive process improvement topics
Our results indicated that the use of root cause analysis can improve the retrospective outcomes by providing in-depth analysis for important software engineering problems, and we suggested that root cause analysis was perceived as a feasible approach for conducting software project retrospectives
Summary
Retrospectives, known as ‘post-mortems’ and ‘post-project reviews’ have often been proposed as a tool for making improvements in software development activities due to their theoretical capability to generate learning and recognise the success and failure of software engineering practice (Dingsøyr 2005).Modern software development methods, such as Scrum (Schwaber and Sutherland 2011), have emphasised the role of retrospectives during the development period as opposed to after it has ended in helping enable continuous learning and process improvement. Since applying retrospectives in this way requires considerable effort from the software teams, it is important to understand the results of such a practice in order to assess its value Despite this need for and the widespread use of retrospectives, their tangible outcomes have received little research attention. Prior studies have not analysed how the outcomes of the retrospectives change over time Such a longitudinal perspective can help us understand the extent to which the reported observations and corrective actions keep repeating themselves and how the topics and improvement ideas change over time. This will help experts evaluate the role of continuous retrospectives for process improvement and knowledge elicitation
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