Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives

Presentation slides for the CHASE 2020 paper “Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives,” C. Matthies, F. Dobrigkeit, and G. Hesse, in IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ACM Press, 2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3387940.3392168

http://www.chaseresearch.org/workshops/chase2020

Transcript

1. Hasso Plattner Institute,
   University of Potsdam, Germany
   christoph.matthies@hpi.de
   @chrisma0
   Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing
   Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives
   Christoph Matthies, Franziska Dobrigkeit, Guenter Hesse
   July ’20
   13th International Workshop on Cooperative and
   Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE’20)
   

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2. Motivation & Background
   2
   Retrospective Meetings and Exercises
   ■ Regular Retrospective meetings in development processes
   ■ Opportunities for process improvement [1]
   ■ Popular in professional software engineering [2]
   ■ Retro exercises/games to encourage idea sharing [3]
   ■ Most Retrospective exercises focus solely on
   gathering perceptions of team members [4]
   [1] Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. 2017. “The Scrum Guide - The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game”. 19 pages.
   [2] Scrum Alliance. 2018. “State of Scrum 2017-2018: Scaling and Agile Transformation”. 36 pages.
   [3] Derby Esther and Diana Larsen. 2006. “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.” Pragmatic Bookshelf. 200 pages.
   [4] Corinna Baldauf. 2018. “Retromat - Run great agile retrospectives!”. Leanpub.com. 239 pages.
   

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3. Software Project Data
   3
   Software Repositories and Other Tools
   ■ Project artifacts created during regular development activities
   contain valuable information on the executed process
   ■ In particular, provide evidence for project problems,
   e.g. when tests fail [5] or systems go down [6] for long periods.
   [5] Celal Ziftci and Jim Reardon. 2017. “Who broke the build? Automatically identify-ing changes that induce test failures in continuous integration at
   Google Scale”. IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track. IEEE, 113–122
   [6] Marc Haberkorn and Kishor Trivedi. 2007. “Availability monitor for a software based system”. 10th IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering
   Symposium. IEEE, 321–328
   

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4. Research Goal
   4
   Applying “Mining Software Repositories” Techniques to Retros
   ■ Mining Software Repositories (MSR) research field [8]
   ■ Focus: extracting insights from vast collections of software data
   ■ Approaches have not yet been applied to software process
   improvement in small, Agile teams
   Goal: Enable an additional, project data-informed view
   of development processes using Retrospective activities
   [8] Ahmed E. Hassan. 2008. “The road ahead for Mining Software Repositories”. Frontiers of Software Maintenance. IEEE, 48–57.
   

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5. Data-Informed Retro Activities
   5
   Progress Check
   ■ Without methods to gauge effectiveness of Retros, organizations
   find it hard to justify expenses of performing Retrospectives [9]
   ■ Project artifact measurements, based on Retro action items,
   can provide results interpretable by teams
   ■ Compare measurements for
   current and following iterations
   [9] David G Marshburn. 2018. “Scrum retrospectives: Measuring and improving effectiveness”.
   SAIS 2018 Proceedings
   

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6. Proposed Retro Activity
   6
   Remedy Appraisal: An Example
   ■ Identified issue: single person committing most of the team’s code
   ■ Action item: Train all team members in VCS usage
   ■ Data measurement: Track progress by the number of unique
   contributors to team’s code repository
   Analyze results in the team, discussion starting points
   ■ Was the original issue resolved?
   ■ Does the measurement need tweaking?
   

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7. Conclusion
   7
   Retrospective Meetings & Data-Informed Activities
   ■ Increasing knowledge on developers’ interactions is available in
   project artifacts, which allows improving dev. processes [10]
   ■ Approaches not yet established in Agile process improvement
   ■ We propose defining new, data-informed Retrospective
   activities based on project data measurements
   ■ Future work: automating data-informed insights,
   e.g. through chatbots or instant messaging channels
   [10] L. Singer, M.-A. Storey, F. Figueira Filho, A. Zagalsky, and D.M. German. 2017. “People Analytics in Software Development”.
   Grand Timely Topics in Software Engineering. Springer, 124–153.
   

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8. Summary
   8
   christoph.matthies@hpi.de
   @chrisma0
   

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9. Image Sources
   9
   In order of appearance
   ■ Mining by Firza Alamsyah from the Noun Project
   ■ perception by Maxim Basinski from the Noun Project
   ■ goal by Alice Design from the Noun Project
   ■ Data Driven HR by Vectors Market from the Noun Project
   ■ discussion by Alice Design from the Noun Project
   ■ Data by Alice Design from the Noun Project
   

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