Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives

TL;DR

This paper proposes mining software repositories to provide data-driven insights for Agile retrospectives, enhancing traditional perception-based discussions with objective process data for better team improvements.

Contribution

It introduces novel retrospective activities that leverage repository mining to offer data-informed process insights in Agile teams.

Findings

New activities for retrospectives based on repository mining

Enhanced objectivity in process improvement discussions

Potential for more effective Agile team improvements

Abstract

Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrospective activities, based on mining the software repositories of individual teams, to complement existing approaches with more objective, data-informed process views.