The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

Having the facilitator, and not the students, write down events on the timeline in task
3 was time-efficient, but requires sensitiveness: the students should not be overrun. A
facilitator in charge of the timeline gets an opportunity to support the reconstruction of
a shared timeline, e.g. when two students name the same event differently.
Recommendation 3: use the proposed sequence of workshop steps. Shifting between
individual and collective effort furthers active participation and multiple perspectives.
We see that some teams might have benefited from a longer discussion. Need for
more time typically increases with the size of the team. Recommendation 4: Use 90
minute time slots, to have more flexibility to adjust to the specific team.
In terms of feasibility for project courses of different sizes, the approach has a per-project
cost of one staff hour plus preparation. Cost of preparation is likely to decrease with the
number of teams facilitated by each staff member. While our workshop design is based on an
agile development approach, it is adequate for other approaches. Recommendation 5: Use the
reflection workshop as part of agile or more structured development approaches. Finally:
Recommendation 6: If the workshop is to be conducted during the course of a project and not
only at its end, the workshop should focus on measures for change, e.g. process improvement.
6. Conclusion and further work
We have proposed a design for postmortem workshops in SE student teams, based on
industry best practice and a theoretical framework accounting for the reflection process.
Based on its implementation in a SE course, we recommend our design, with additional
recommendations made in Section 5. In our continued research and course development
we will introduce a postmortem workshop in the middle of the projects, using a similar
design with stronger focus on process improvement and specific change measures.
7. Acknowledgements
Thanks to the NTNU project MOTUS2, the SE students, Torgeir Dingsøyr,and John Krogstie.
7. References
[1] T. Dingsøyr, "Postmortem reviews: purpose and approaches in software engineering," Information and
Software Technology, vol. 47, pp. 293-303, 2005.
[2] V. Kasi, M. Keil, L. Mathiassen, and K. Pedersen, "The post mortem paradox: a Delphi study of IT specialist
perceptions," European Journal of IS, vol. 17, pp. 62-78, 2008.
[3] A. Strauss, Continual permutations of action. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993.
[4] P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. London: Penguin Books, 1966.
[5] G. H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934.
[6] H. H. Clark and S. A. Brennan: Grounding in communication. In L.B. Resnick, J.M. Levine, & S.D. Teasley
(Eds.). Perspectives on socially shared cognition . Washington: APA Books, 1991
[7] J. Dewey, How we think. A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process (Revised
edtn.) ed. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1933.
[8] D. Boud, R. Keogh, and D. Walker, Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning: RoutledgeFalmer, 1985.
[9] E. Derby, D. Larsen, and K. Schwaber, Agile Retrospectives.: Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006.
[10] N. B. Moe and T. Dingsøyr, "Agile development and teamwork: A case study of a Scrum team and teamwork
organization," Work in progress, 2008.
[11] B. Krogstie and B. Bygstad, "Cross-Community Collaboration and Learning in Customer-Driven Software
Engineering Student Projects," in CSEE&T, Dublin, 2007, pp. 336-343.
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