Are Your Online Agile Retrospectives Psychologically Safe? the Usage of Online Tools

Abstract

One essential prerequisite for successful agile retrospective sessions is to accomplish a psychologically safe environment. Creating a psychologically safe environment for the co-located team is challenging. Further, it becomes more demanding with online agile retrospective teams. Literature sheds little light on creating a psychologically safe online environment for conducting agile retrospectives. Our study aims at addressing this knowledge gap and asks the research question: how does the usage of online tools influence psychological safety in online agile retrospectives? A single case study was conducted with a major software company’s Research and Development team. We analysed a recorded online retrospective session of the team to identify patterns of the usage of online tools associated with the online meeting platform they used and how that usage influenced the psychological safety level of the team. Our findings show that retrospective participants are psychologically safe if they share opinions, make mistakes, raise a problem, ask questions, and show consent using online tools. Our study contributes online tools that influence psychological safety factors, corresponding levels and behaviours.