Counteracting Agile Retrospective Problems with Retrospective Activities

Hasso Plattner Institute
University of Potsdam, Germany
christoph.matthies@hpi.de
@chrisma0
Counteracting Agile Retrospective Problems
with Retrospective Activities
Christoph Matthies
, Edinburgh, September ’19

Scrum Development Method
2
The Role of the Retrospective Meeting
Source: C. Matthies, F. Dobrigkeit, and A. Ernst, “Counteracting Agile Retrospective Problems with Retrospective Activities,” in
Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp. 532–545

Scrum Development Method
3
The Role of the Retrospective Meeting
Source: C. Matthies, F. Dobrigkeit, and A. Ernst, “Counteracting Agile Retrospective Problems with Retrospective Activities,” in

Retrospective Meetings
4
Definition
opportunity for the team to inspect itself
– The Scrum Guide [Schwaber, 2017]
“ ”[Schwaber, 2017] K. Schwaber, J. Sutherland, “The Scrum Guide - The Definitive Guide to Scrum,” (2017)
[online] http://scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf
Image: https://www.scrum.org/resources/2017-scrum-guide-update-ken-schwaber-and-jeff-sutherland
■ Time and space to discuss and improve development process
■ Looking back after a development iteration

Retrospective Meetings
5
Process Improvement in Scrum
■ Goal: Increased performance and enjoyment
in the following iteration [Schwaber, 2004]
■ 85% of State of Agile survey participants used Retros [VO, 2018]
■ SPI Manifesto [Pries-Heje, 2010]:
□ “Motivate all people involved“
□ “Create a learning organization”
[Schwaber, 2004] Schwaber, K.: Agile Project Management with Scrum. Microsoft Press (2004)
[VO, 2018] VersionOne Inc.: The 12th Annual State of Agile Report. Tech. rep. (2018)
[Pries-Heje, 2010] Pries-Heje, J., Johansen, J.: SPI Manifesto. European system &
software process improvement and innovation (2010)

Retrospective Problems
6
Commonly Occurring Issues
■ Retrospectives face unique challenges [Loeffler, 2017]
□ Unfamiliar setting and tasks
□ Different skill sets
■ Agile process facilitators identified problems that commonly
occur in Retrospectives [Rubin, 2012]
□ Hindering teams in realizing their full potential
□ e.g. participants not speaking up
[Loeffler, 2017] Loeffler, M.: Improving Agile Retrospectives: Helping Teams Become More Efficient. Addison-Wesley
Professional (2017)
[Rubin, 2012] Rubin, K.S.: Essential Scrum: A practical guide to the most popular Agile process. Addison-Wesley (2012)

Retrospective Activities
7
Games to Structure Retrospectives
■ Proposed activities / games to structure Retros [Jovanovic, 2015]
□ “timeboxed processes that [...]
help your team think together” [Derby, 2006]
□ Encourage equal participation and exploring new perspectives
■ Explicit assignments of problems to activities
only exist in a few cases [Jovanović, 2016]
[Jovanovic, 2015] Jovanovic, M., Mesquida, A.L., Mas, A.: Process improvement with retrospective gaming in agile
software development. In: Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement. pp. 287–294. Springer (2015)
[Derby, 2006] Derby, E., Larsen, D.: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Pragmatic Bookshelf Series,
Pragmatic Bookshelf (2006)
[Jovanović, 2016] Jovanović, M., Mesquida, A.L., Radaković, N., Mas, A.: Agile retrospective games for diﬀerent team
development phases. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 1489–1508 (2016)

Research Goals
8
Research Questions
■ Provide guidance to process facilitators in choosing activities
which counteract identified problems in their retrospectives
Hypotheses
■ H1 Existing Agile Retrospective activities already address specific
problems without explicitly mentioning so
■ H2 Scrum Masters can address their teams’ Retrospective
problems with problem-specific activities

Research Agenda
9
Steps To Be Followed
1. Collect Retrospective problems and activities
from research literature and online resources
2. Map activities to problems they address,
generate hypotheses
3. Conduct case studies in Agile teams
to evaluate the real-world eﬀects

Collecting Problems & Activities
10
Extracting Common Retrospective Problems and Activities
■ Recent previous collection efforts [Loeffler, 2016; Jovanović, 2016]
■ Explicitly included popular practitioner websites
□ Most relevant to practitioners [Beecham, 2014]
□ Most up-to-date
□ Example: Agile Retrospective Wiki [Bowley, 2018]
■ Deduplication, Issues not solvable by Retros structure removed
[Loeffler, 2017] Loeffler, M.: Improving Agile Retrospectives: Helping Teams Become More Efficient. Addison-Wesley Professional (2017)
[Jovanović, 2016] Jovanović, M., Mesquida, A.L., Radaković, N., Mas, A.: Agile retrospective games for different team development phases. Journal of
Universal Computer Science, 1489–1508 (2016)
[Beecham, 2014] Beecham, S., O’Leary, P., Baker, S., Richardson, I., Noll, J.: Making Software Engineering Research Relevant. Computer, 80–83 (2014)
[Bowley, 2018] Bowley, R., Linders, B.: Common ailments & cures (2018), http://retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?title=Common_ailments_%26_cures,
[online] Accessed: 2019-01-11

Mapping Activities to Problems
11
Method
■ Compile descriptions and explanations from primary sources
■ Discussion and qualitative analysis
□ Iterative coding using emergent topics
□ Clustering of topics
□ Consensus between three involved researchers
■ Generate hypotheses on which activities
remedy which problems

Mapping Activities to Problems
12
Example: Peaks and Valleys Timeline
Peaks and Valleys Timeline | Not Speaking Up
■ After deliberation, participants plot their mood development over
last sprint in shared graph [Caroli, 2015]
■ Individual, silent thinking time
■ Sharing carefully considered
points promotes voicing thoughts
■ Artifact for starting discussions
[Caroli, 2015] Caroli, P., Caetano, T.: Fun Retrospectives — Activities and ideas for
making agile retrospectives more engaging. Leanpub, Layton (2015)

Problem-Activity Mapping
13
Retrospective Problems of the Mapping
■ 9 Retrospective problems — Challenges to tackle
□ All Talk–No Action
□ Too Repetitive
□ No Preparation
□ Blame Game
□ Not Speaking Up
□ Taking It Personally
□ Group Think
□ Focus on Negatives
□ Complain Game
For details: C. Matthies, F. Dobrigkeit, and A. Ernst, “Counteracting Agile Retrospective Problems with Retrospective Activities,” in

Problem-Activity Mapping
14
Retrospective Activities of the Mapping
■ 14 Retrospective activities — Things to do
□ e.g. Sailboat, Futurespective,
Peaks and Valleys Timeline
...

Case Study
15
Evaluating the Created Activity-Problem Mapping
■ Observational case studies in 6 Agile teams
□ 4 student teams, 1 startup team, 1 large corporation team
□ Scrum Master interviews, surveys of developers
■ 4 observed problems
□ No Preparation, Not Speaking Up,
All Talk–No Action, Too Repetitive
■ Administered 10 distinct Retrospective activities
which tackle these problems

Case Study Results
16
Evaluating the Created Activity-Problem Mapping
...
■ Found evidence for problem resolution in vast majority of cases
□ Only two cases showed no improvement
□ Validated with Scrum Master interviews
■ Evidence for applicability of proposed mapping

Survey Results
17
Perceptions of Team Members Regarding Activity Introduction
Peaks and Valleys Timeline

Survey Results
18
Summary of Team Member Perceptions
■ Retrospective participants, in general, enjoyed team activities
□ Welcome change in structure
□ In line with related work on the subject [Jovanović, 2016]
■ Activities designed to be engaging
□ Risk of not achieving original goals
□ “have fun, but have a purpose” [Derby, 2006]
[Jovanović, 2016] Jovanović, M., Mesquida, A.L., Radaković, N., Mas, A.: Agile retrospective games for diﬀerent
team development phases. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 1489–1508 (2016)
[Derby, 2006] Derby, E., Larsen, D.: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Pragmatic Bookshelf Series,
Pragmatic Bookshelf (2006)

Conclusions
19
Summary of Findings regarding Research Hypotheses
■ Identiﬁed multiple collected problems in Retrospectives of
professional and educational teams
■ Showed connections between several common Retro activities
and problems collected from literature and practitioner websites
H1 Existing Agile Retrospective activities already address
speciﬁc problems without explicitly mentioning so
✓

Conclusions
20
Summary of Findings regarding Research Hypotheses
■ Scrum Masters successfully introduced activities into their
regular team meetings when problems were identiﬁed
■ Activities received positively by team members
H2 Scrum Masters can address their teams’
Retrospective problems with problem-speciﬁc activities
✓

■ Activity-Problem mapping: ﬁrst step for connecting research on
process improvement and Retrospective activities
■ Mapping can be employed in teams’ Retrospectives to combat
common problems
■ Excellent Retrospectives can improve teamwork, work
satisfaction, quality of work and productivity [Gonçalves, 2014]
■ Future work: Reﬁne mapping and make it more accessible for
practitioners, e.g. through websites or software solutions
Conclusions
21
Summary of Findings
[Gonçalves,, 2014] Gonçalves, L., Linders, B.: Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives - A Toolbox of Retrospective
Exercises. Lulu. com (2014)

■ Meeting by Shocho from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Games by Icons Producer from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Meeting by Chanut is Industries from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Problem by Smalllike from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Games by Smalllike from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Target by Arthur Shlain from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Research by Eucalyp from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Books by sandra from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Research by Petai Jantrapoon from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Observation by Jugalbandi from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
■ Survey by Michael Thompson from the Noun Project (CC-BY 3.0)
Image Credits
23
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Counteracting Agile Retrospective Problems with Retrospective Activities

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