In today's fast-paced world of rapid technological change, software development teams need to constantly revise their work practices. Not surprisingly, regular reflection on how to become more effective is perceived as one of the most important principles of Agile Software Development. Nevertheless, running an effective and enjoyable retrospective meeting is still a challenge in real environments. As reported by several studies, the Sprint Retrospective is an agile practice most likely to be implemented improperly or sacrificed when teams perform under pressure to deliver. To facilitate the implementation of the practice, some agile coaches have proposed to set up retrospective meetings in the form of retrospective games. However, there has been little research-based evidence to support the positive effects of retrospective games. Our aim is to investigate whether the adoption of retrospective games can improve retrospective meetings in general and lead to positive societal outcomes. In this paper, we report on an Action Research project in which we implemented six retrospective games in six Scrum teams that had experienced common retrospective problems. The received feedback indicates that the approach helped the teams to mitigate many of the "accidental difficulties" pertaining to the Sprint Retrospective, such as lack of structure, dullness, too many complaints, or unequal participation and made the meetings more productive to some degree. Moreover, depending on their individual preferences, different participants perceived different games as having a positive impact on their communication, motivation-and-involvement, and/or creativity, even though there were others, less numerous, who had an opposite view. The advantages and disadvantages of each game as well as eight lessons learned are presented in the paper.

Abstract The principal focus of software product management is to ensure the economic success of the product, which means to prolong the product life as much as possible with modest expenditures to maximizs profits. Software product managers play an important role in the software development organization while being responsible for the strategy, business case, product roadmap, high-level requirements, product deployment (release-management), and retirement plan. This article explores the problems that affect the software product management process, their perceived frequency and perceived severity. The data were collected by a systematic literature review (5 main databases were analyzed), interviews (10 software product managers from IT companies), and surveys (89 participants). 95 software product management problems assigned nonexclusively to 7 areas were identified. 27 commonly mentioned software product management problems were evaluated for their perceived frequency and perceived severity. The problems perceived as the most frequent are: determining the true value of the product that the customer needs, strategy and priorities change frequently, technical debt, working in silos, and balancing between reactive and proactive work. In total, 95 problems have been identified which have been narrowed down to 27 problems based on their occurrence in at least 3 interviews. These selected problems were prioritized by perceived frequency and perceived severity. Some of the identified problems spanned beyond the software product management process itself, but they all affect the work of software product managers.

The aim of the paper is to identify the role of the software product manager depending on the size of the company and the characteristics of the product they are working on.This has been achieved in cooperation with 15 experts from the IT industry.The companies were divided into 4 levels of size: micro-enterprises, small businesses, medium businesses and large enterprises.The characteristics of the products were divided into business-business (B2B) and business-customer (B2C).This way, 8 personas of software product managers have been developed.Differences in this role were mainly related to the staffing, its scope of responsibility, tools and techniques used as well as the mode of work with the target customers.Many common aspects of this role have also been identified that made it possible to define archetype persona of a software product manager.All personas have been validated by experts who offered their improvements.