Learning in the Large - An Exploratory Study of Retrospectives in Large-Scale Agile Development
This research addresses the problem of improving learning outcomes in large-scale agile development for software teams, but it is incremental as it builds on prior team-level studies.
The study examined how retrospectives are used in large-scale agile development by analyzing 109 issues and 36 action items from reports, finding that most issues relate to team-level learning and improvement.
Many see retrospectives as the most important practice of agile software development. Previous studies of retrospectives have focused on pro- cess and outcome at team level. In this article, we study how a large-scale agile development project uses retrospectives through an analysis of retrospective reports identifying a total of 109 issues and 36 action items as a part of a longitudinal case study. We find that most of the issues identified relate to team-level learning and improvement, and discuss these findings in relation to current advice to improve learning outcome in large-scale agile development.