In the retrospective meeting, developers and testers can sum up their work. These points can be compared to the objectives set at the beginning of the project. In this way, teams can improve their skills and achieve higher levels of efficiency. But how do you organize a retrospective meeting? Here are some quick “how-to” tips to help you manage a retrospective meeting quickly and successfully.”
Retrospection is one of the main and most important events for any scrum or agile teams. There are lot of ways teams does retrospection.
Some teams will use basic spread sheet to collect all the necessary points and it does work well to.
But many times, you could observe more time is going for managing data via spread sheets, getting tougher to collect feedback from people (many are not that OPEN to share feedback) or conducting voting kind of things on priorities and managing action items etc.
That’s where online retrospective tools would be of great help to teams.
There are lot of online retrospective tools available in the market and many of these are completely free to use and some of them offer either FREE trail or FREE option with limited features.
The intent of this article is to introduce you to all these free retrospective tools online and enable you to pick the right tool to conduct retrospectives engagingly with your teams.
Getting the Most Out of Online Retrospective Tools
Rarely agile teams use just one tool to conduct their retrospectives online. It’s usually a combination of different services. A typical example would include a video conferencing app (e.g. Zoom) a messenger (e.g. Slack), a retrospective sprint online tool to organize feedback, and in some cases, a whiteboard.
No matter what tools you use, here are some common attributes that you need to ensure those tools provide:
Good Retrospective Tools Facilitate Equal Feedback
Some voices in your team will be louder than others. Unfortunately, those loud voices tend to offset other team members’ opinions. Often this leads to an unbalanced view on the current problems.
A good online retrospective tool facilitates equal feedback from every team member. For example, when there’s a question “Why is our database access so slow?” pops up during the retrospective, the tool ensures that every participant provides their answers to this question by either collecting written feedback or controlling the time every team member gets to voice their opinion.
Example: Geekbot asks every team member the same question with Slack direct messages, so that even shy colleagues could easily provide their ideas in a written form rather than struggling to voice them in front of a group of people.
Useful Retrospective Online Tools Prevent Chaos
When your team members are active, many ideas will be put on the table, which is good. What’s not good is when you can’t organize these ideas and are left with a dozen solutions that don’t go well with each other.
Great retrospective tools make sure that the feedback from your team members can be easily organized. An example would be the ability to put ideas into related columns or tag ideas so that you could instantly see emerging themes rather than a bunch of disparate concepts.
Example: Trello allows you to easily create several columns and effortlessly drag items between these columns. The process is so simple it lets your team to group your ideas as fast as they are coming in.
Great Retrospective Tools Eliminate Groupthink
Another common issue with retrospectives is when team members see other ideas and stop thinking on their own. This is usually the case when someone else has voiced a strong opinion before.
In order to prevent that, a good retrospective tool ensures the feedback is gathered independently, asynchronously, or even anonymously, if the problem is persistent.
Example: Geekbot allows every team member to answer retrospective questions privately using Slack bot. After that all the answers from different team members are merged into a separate Slack channel.
With Geekbot you can send a set of retrospective questions to your team members directly in Slack. After they have answered them, the bot then sends all the responses into a designed Slack channel so that the team could later analyze feedback from everyone and come up with action plans to improve the current state of things.
Pros:
Full customization: customize retrospective questions to your particular needs: change questions, add icebreakers, configure the time
NLP-analysis: Geekbot can provide NLP-analysis to team responses if you need additional info on team morale
Asynchronous, equal feedback: team members share feedback equally and at the most convenient time for them, allowing remote teams to effectively run retrospectives even with employees distributed over different time zones.
Cons:
Works only with Slack
Whiteboards
Whiteboards are often used in office retrospective sessions, but they require an experienced scrum master or team lead to quickly put feedback from team members on the boards.
Online whiteboards have a critical advantage over office boards: they are more flexible. Once you put ideas on the digital whiteboard you can easily edit and rearrange them during your discussions.
If your team likes to use whiteboards during retrospectives, here are some services you might find useful:
Limnu: realistic collaborative whiteboard experience
AWW: rich functionality with ability to embed whiteboards onto webpages
Stormboard: a combination of a whiteboard and a sticky-note organizer
Pros:
Whiteboards are great for teams and scrum master who are used to running retrospectives using them
A wide range of whiteboard services for different teams
Cons:
Needs smart management to prevent chaos and board cluttering
Additional effort to export visual ideas and messages into action lists
Online Sprint Retrospectives Tools
There are several online services developed specifically for running online retrospectives. Usually, they utilize a predefined workflow that gets teams through every step of the retrospective process, from gathering ideas to later prioritizing them and converting into action lists.
Although services like these simplify running retrospectives, they too require an experienced Scrum Master or a manager to make the most out of them.
Here are some of the online retrospective services you can try:
Reetro.io
Parabol
Scatterspoke
Funretro.io
Retrium
Pros:
An organized process for conducting online retrospectives
Cons:
Some services are not easily customized to the needs of the particular team
Mind Maps
If your team likes to search for original and elaborate ways to tackle their problems, mind maps can be a great opportunity to combine retrospective processes with brainstorming.
Just remember retrospectives need to stay actionable in order to be useful. No matter how creative the input is, you need to have good management in place to make sure those mind mapping sessions are organized and later implemented via specific actions.
Examples of mind map services to help run online retrospectives:
Miro
Mindmup
Lucidchart
Milanote
Pros:
Facilitates creative input and synthesis of ideas
Cons:
Quickly turns into chaos if managed improperly
Team Analyzers
Sometimes the reason why a certain team is struggling lies within the team itself. Employees can be dissatisfied with certain aspects of their work, but often they won’t speak about those openly, especially during retrospectives when the whole team might be listening.
It’s important to unearth such issues and discuss them during retrospectives without blaming anyone. And certain tools can help you do that.
Geekbot: run surveys directly in Slack and perform NLP-analysis of team responses over time to track the morale within your team and how it affects their work.
TeamMood: use email surveys and check the well-being of your team with mood indicators, graph, and calendars.
Officevibe: collect anonymous feedback from your teammates with custom polls and analyse historical data with survey reports on 10 key metrics.
Free Online Retrospective Tools
Below are some free online retrospective services that lets you run team retrospectives if you’re short on budget.
RemoteRetro: a free open-source online retrospective tool that lets you run collaborative online sessions with your team members and supports all key retrospective processes such as idea generation, voting, labelling, and action list generation.
Retrospected: a free agile retrospective tool that doesn’t require registration. In addition to standard features, it stores history of previous retrospections and provides a mobile-friendly version. Bonus: integration with Giphy service.
IdeaBoardz: a free tool that allows your team to gather inputs and move them across columns on a digital board. The board is shared via the link so your team can access it independently to provide their input. Finally, you can filter and organize all the notes and export the data to a pdf or Excel sheet.
Trello: although Trello is mainly used for Kanban-style organization of team work, it’s flexible enough and can be adapted for running retrospectives. For example, you can create “Positives” and “Negatives” columns and then drag team notes between them. Additional columns can be created on the go.
Miro
Even though I haven’t used Miro for a retrospective yet, it would be unfair not to mention it given that MetroRetro is part of the list.
I have used it extensively for other types of meetings over the past year and it is definitely a suitable retro tool.
What you’ll get for free:
- 3 (retro) boards
- Unlimited columns (much like MetroRetro, you can create sections as you wish)
- Public and private boards
What’s missing:
- Action tracking is difficult as Miro is not a dedicated retro tool
- Remember what I wrote about MetroRetro’s UX? Since Miro is a highly versatile tool, you will end up spending a significant amount of time on the toolbar between things that you need and won’t need.
Conclusion
Online tools are becoming increasingly popular in the web industry. And for good reason. The best ones make it easier, save time and effort – or can even automate certain tasks (natural language processing for example).