I was wondering what are the best practices regarding Scrum retrospectives results distribution.
Do you share the results with every other teams and even outside R&D or do you make the results available to the team only?
The results of our retrospectives contain suggestions on what we need to continue doing in the next iterations along with what we need to start doing and stop doing.
I don't try to keep information like this from anyone who asks. Even if management has no interest in the outcomes from your retrospective, I would still recommend giving them some of the artifacts that result. But, I usually keep them with the team because retrospectives are a way to help your team self correct.
Linda Rising, in an excellent interview on SE Radio, described retrospectives as therapy sessions. I highly recommend listening to this interview for some thoughts behind the exercises in retrospectives.
In my experience, the result of these Retrospectives are presented once, there might be a workshop due to some impediments found, but nearly nothing changes in the next sprints.
Thats sad, but that how I know it till now.
What should be done with the results? I think everybody who is in a team, which does the same stuff like yours should know your results from these meetings, so they won't have to make the same mistakes: but I don't think that I want to know the results of a marketing-team retrospective.
I'd strongly suggest putting the results into some form of internal knowledge base or wiki - some form of knowledge capture and sharing technique.
Presenting the results to specific folks may not be appropriate today but easily could be tomorrow.
Having that data collected and available will give future 'generations' the opportunity to do a search across the intranet to see what failed in the past, or more than mere anecdotal data to give in response to future problems, "We had that happen once.... and here is what we did about it:".