The Retro App

Retrospectives and reflections allow you to codify what you’ve learned from experience, to document mistakes and avoid future ones, and to increase your potential to grow in the future

One of the key ceremonies in Agile methodologies is the Retrospective, a chance for teams to feedback on how they are feeling. Whether it’s at the end of a sprint or a monthly occurrence, it is vital that teams have the chance to voice challenges and concerns… but what is the best way to do it?

The classic ‘”What’s gone well?”, “What’s not gone so well?”, and “What can we do better?”‘ is one of the most common, regardless of the visual used (sinking sailing boats and soaring hot-air balloons, anyone?). This can work but as innovators, we knew we could do better. We took a leaf out of Spotify’s Engineering Squads, who ask a question of their team and whose members then reply with either a green, amber or red. These responses are then discussed together. We found this approach identified problem areas and spotted trends quickly, allowing the team to take action where needed.

But rather than just sticking with paper cards and questions, we decided to put our own tech spin on it and created the tsf.tech Retro App. This not just helped facilitate the session in person, but allowed us to engage people remotely and also collect results over time. The result, we can see how answers change over time as a team, we can see trends up and down, we can see sudden drops on topics and ask why. All of these enable our retrospectives to be more impactful and meaningful, so much so we’ve decided to open it up to the world!

Features of Retro App

• Team size of up to 15 people
• Create your own question and answer cards for your team
• Assign leaders to retro to share the responsibility of facilitation
• Choose whether to show results from each answer or wait until the end for a holistic view
• Review historic results to track trends and changes across your retrospectives.

If you would like to try this approach out with your teams you can get a month’s free trial by visiting the following link:

https://tsf-retro.web.app/