Thu 30 May 2019 11:00 - 12:30 at Mansfield / Sherbrooke - Selected Presentations Chair(s): Alessandro Garcia, Julia Rubin
Working in iterations and repeatedly improving team workflows based on collected feedback is fundamental to agile software development processes. Scrum, the most popular agile method, provides dedicated retrospective meetings to discuss process improvement actions. However, agile methods not prescribe how improvement steps should be identified, managed or tracked in detail. The approaches to detect and remove problems in software development processes are therefore often based on intuition and the experience of team members. Previous research in this area has focused on approaches to elicit a team’s improvement opportunities as well as measurements regarding the work performed in an iteration, e.g. Scrum burn-down charts. Little research deals with the quality and nature of identified problems or how progress towards removing issues is measured. In this research we investigate how agile development teams in the professional software industry organize their feedback and process improvement approaches. In particular, we focus on the structure and content of improvement and reflection meetings, i.e. retrospectives, and their outcomes. Researching how the vital mechanism of process improvement is implemented in practice in modern software development leads to a more complete picture of agile process improvement.