Making agile retrospectives more awesome

Abstract

According to the textbook [23], Scrum exists only in its entirety, where every component is essential to Scrum's success. However, in many organizational environments some of the components are omitted or modified in a way that is not aligned with the Scrum guidelines. Usually, such deviations result in missing the full benefits of Scrum [24]. Thereby, a Scrum process should be frequently inspected and any deviations should be corrected [23]. In this paper, we report on an Action Research project conducted in Intel Technology Poland to revise the work practices related to the Retrospective. During the focus group discussion in the company, retrospectives were generally judged ineffective because 'the same things are discussed over and over'. To cope with this challenge, we revitalized retrospectives by adopting collaborative games. The feedback received from three Scrum teams indicates that our approach improved participants' creativity, involvement, and communication, and produced better results than the standard retrospective.