Playing With Your Project Data in Scrum Retrospectives

Modern, agile software development methods rely on iterative work and improvement cycles to deliver their claimed benefits. In Scrum, the most popular agile method, process improvement is implemented through regular Retrospective meetings. In these meetings, team members reflect on the latest development iteration and decide on improvement actions. To identify potential issues, data on the completed iteration needs to be gathered. The Scrum method itself does not prescribe these steps in detail. However, Retrospective games, i.e. interactive group activities, have been proposed to encourage the sharing of experiences and problems. These activities mostly rely on the collected perceptions of team members. However, modern software development practices produce a large variety of digital project artifacts, e.g. commits in version control systems or test run results, which contain detailed information on performed teamwork. We propose taking advantage of this information in new, data-driven Retrospective activities, allowing teams to gain additional insights based on their own team-specific data.