Scrum retrospective is a meeting held at the end of each sprint in the Scrum, where the development team reflects on their performance and identifies areas of improvement for the next sprint. It provides an opportunity to evaluate the team’s effectiveness, identify obstacles, and make adjustments to improve the overall efficiency and productivity of the team. The goal of the retrospective is to continuously improve the team’s performance and the quality of the product.

Usually tools used for retrospective have varied a lot. Some teams may use post-it notes where they write things that need to be improved and things, that needs to be avoided. Another team might go through things by talking and writing a memo for later usage (we all know how that goes), but now there’s a new sheriff in town and he brought some weapons with him.

Retrospective by Microsoft DevLabs is a free, fully loaded retrospective minigun tool thingy, that takes you through a retrospective meeting with a touch of stone cold barrel and to be honest… this thing is loaded with features.

The tool integrates with Azure DevOps Boards and comes as new left menu option. It supports multiple different ready made templates, that you can use to guide the conversation during retro. Cool part is, that with different templates you can get variance into your otherwise rather boring retro meetings.

You can also customize the templates, or even create your own if you cannot find suitable from 13 different ready made templates.

The Retro

Retrospective starts from selecting the template (or customizing it). After finding suitable the tool creates retrospective for an on-going sprint, that can be used to fill in the ideas. Users can create new feedback items, which can be voted (up or down) and grouped to keep similar things in correct columns. All of these features are separated into different tabs, so that they can be used to phase things in the meeting. You can start from collecting feedbacks, then group things, vote for them and finally create new work items (actions) for most voted feedbacks. You even have a timer for different feedbacks, so that you can define like 5 minute discussion time for each item. Brilliant!

When and if the feedback is converted into user story, the system adds some basic details into work item. For example, feedback and reflect-hub tags and comment about which retro was used to create the work item.

Team Assessment

One of the many features is an ability to create team assessments. Team assessment creates a new button next to retrospective tab pages. Every member of the team can use it and give anonymous feedback. The questions are hard coded, but they are very good out of the box solution and provide a lot of info about current state of the team. How well they balance with work-life, how safe they feel in risk taking etc.

When all members have filled the assessment (or as many member as you want to), the results are available at the retrospective summary page. The summary page is quite well hidden under the … menu and I wished it would be available like after closing the sprint retro.

Summary page shows a nice overview of the feedbacks (how many were given, how many was turned into work items) and the team assessment results. Mine was rather bothering.

Summary

I personally think, that this is a great tool for holding retro meetings and I will definitely use it more in the near future. The ready-made templates provides set of tools for varying the content of retro meetings and makes them more interesting. Thanks to the Team Assessment tool, I can easily collect the general feeling from the team and follow the development of the team spirit trend between sprints.