Learning in the Large - An Exploratory Study of Retrospectives in Large-Scale Agile Development

TL;DR

This study explores how large-scale agile development projects utilize retrospectives, revealing that most issues focus on team learning and improvement, with implications for enhancing learning outcomes.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of retrospective reports in large-scale agile projects, highlighting the nature of issues and actions over time.

Findings

Most issues relate to team learning and improvement

Retrospectives identify 109 issues and 36 actions

Insights inform better practices for large-scale agile retrospectives

Abstract

Many see retrospectives as the most important practice of agile software development. Previous studies of retrospectives have focused on pro- cess and outcome at team level. In this article, we study how a large-scale agile development project uses retrospectives through an analysis of retrospective reports identifying a total of 109 issues and 36 action items as a part of a longitudinal case study. We find that most of the issues identified relate to team-level learning and improvement, and discuss these findings in relation to current advice to improve learning outcome in large-scale agile development.