The impact of project retrospectives on process improvement initiatives: A case study

Retrospectives in a software engineering project course: Getting students to get the most from a project experience

“…Several guides for project retrospectives can be found in the literature [7,8,12,17], including excellent advice for retrospective facilitators [4,6]. Retrospectives are held at the end of a project, or in some agile development methods, at the end of a development cycle or sprint.…”

“…As in industry, few projects are unqualified successes. A large number of industry projects have high levels of success, but fail to achieve all of the project objectives [2,6]. The retrospective is introduced as an attempt to learn from our successes and our mistakes and understand where we succeeded, and where we fell short.…”

“…In his seminal work, Kerth [7] recommends that a retrospective be given three full days, be conducted off-site, and be led by an outside expert. However, in practice, most retrospectives are given much less time [4,6,10,16]. During the retrospective, the team attempts to learn as much about the project and the functioning of the team as possible in an attempt to improve the team's function on the next project, or in agile development, the next development cycle.…”

“…A retrospective gives the software teams the opportunity to review the history of the project, to help team members understand the need for improvement, learn from successes as well as failures, and provide important feedback to the team about important events in the life of the project. Research indicates that not only does the retrospective help improve processes, it helps teams build trust [6].…”