Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives
This addresses the need for more objective process improvement in Agile software development teams, though it is incremental as it builds on existing retrospective practices.
The paper tackled the problem of Agile Retrospective meetings relying on subjective perceptions by proposing new activities that mine software repositories to provide objective, data-informed views of team processes, resulting in a complementary approach to existing methods.
Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrospective activities, based on mining the software repositories of individual teams, to complement existing approaches with more objective, data-informed process views.