  Effective Retrospective meetings are vital for ensuring productive
development processes because they provide the means for Agile software
development teams to discuss and decide on future improvements of their
collaboration. Retrospective agendas often include activities that encourage
sharing ideas and motivate participants to discuss possible improvements. The
outcomes of these activities steer the future directions of team dynamics and
influence team happiness. However, few empirical evaluations of Retrospective
activities are currently available. Additionally, most activities rely on team
members experiences and neglect to take existing project data into account.
With this paper we want to make a case for data-driven decision-making
principles, which have largely been adopted in other business areas. Towards
this goal we review existing retrospective activities and highlight activities
that already use project data as well as activities that could be augmented to
take advantage of additional, more subjective data sources. We conclude that
data-driven decision-making principles, are advantageous, and yet underused, in
modern Agile software development. Making use of project data in retrospective
activities would strengthen this principle and is a viable approach as such
data can support the teams in making decisions on process improvement.
