Retrospective games in Intel Technology Poland

Abstract

One of the Agile principles is that the team should regularly reflect on 'how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly'. While the setup of a retrospective session is intuitive, in praxis, conducting successful retrospectives is challenging. This paper is a continuation of our previous work on the use collaborative games in addressing common retrospective problems. In addition to the replication of our previous action research in a new context, we aim to investigate whether preliminary anonymous idea generation mitigates negative social influences that have been identified as causes of poor performance of brainstorming. The obtained results confirms the previous findings that game-based retrospectives produces better results than the standard retrospective as well as improves participants' creativity, involvement, and communication. Our findings also suggest benefits to the preliminary anonymous idea generation.