Counteracting Agile Retrospective Problems with Retrospective Activities.

Retrospective meetings are a fundamental part of Agile software development methods. Effective retrospectives can positively impact teamwork, productivity, and work satisfaction. In this paper, we focus on problems that commonly occur during these meetings. To address them, we suggest retrospective activities that are already used in practice. These activities provide structure and guide the team through the meeting. We created a mapping between a selection of these activities and the problems they attempt to solve. We evaluated the created mapping through multiple case studies with software development teams in educational and professional contexts. Our results verify the existence of a relationship between specific retrospective activities and connected retrospective problems. Furthermore, using observational studies we could verify parts of the created problem-activity mapping.