Reflection in agile retrospectives

Abstract

A retrospective is a standard agile meeting practice designed for agile software teams to reflect and tune their process. Despite its integral importance, we know little about what aspects are focused upon during retrospectives and how reflection occurs in this practice. We conducted Case Study research involving data collected from interviews of sixteen software practitioners from four agile teams and observations of their retrospective meetings. We found that the important aspects focused on during the retrospective meeting include identifying and discussing obstacles, discussing feelings, analyzing previous action points, identifying background reasons, identifying future action points and generating a plan. Reflection occurs when the agile teams embody these aspects within three levels of reflection: reporting and responding, relating and reasoning, and reconstructing. Critically, we show that agile teams may not achieve all levels of reflection simply by performing retrospective meetings. One of the key contributions of our work is to present a reflection framework for agile retrospective meetings that explains and embeds three levels of reflection within the five steps of a standard agile retrospective. Agile teams can use this framework to achieve better focus and higher levels of reflection in their retrospective meetings.