Running Retros Remotely

During the last one month of remote working, our team participated in several meetings and agile ceremonies. Luckily thanks to our dual shore model, we were in a way prepared. All our meetings before the lockdown were physical and virtual in nature. Thus, enabling us to work efficiently during these times. Of all the meetings and agile ceremonies one which tested the best of our communication skills was retrospective meeting.

Retrospective meetings seek everyone’s active participation. A team which actively contributes to a retrospective is also a team which is committed towards betterment. The tricky part for any scrum master is to make sure the above-mentioned points are covered in each retrospective and it becomes even more challenging when team is working in a dual shore or remote setup. At such times online tools comes handy. Though there are several tools available in the market, I am going to share my experience about two of them viz. Pointing Poker Retrospective Tool & Fun Retro

PointingPoker.com/Retro

“Online, virtual and co-located agile teams use this application during their planning/pointing sessions to effectively communicate points for stories.”

Pointing poker is an amazingly simple tool. It follows a simple retro template of “Start Doing”, “Stop Doing” & “Continue Doing”. The best part of it is free to use and do not ask for any kind of your details. Enter your name and start the session, just share the url with your team and you are all set.

Pros:

1. Free to use
2. No signup required, no spam
3. Scalable — support any number of teams
4. Desktop, tablet and mobile ready
5. Entry & Review mode — helps in controlling the retro flow
6. Clear demarcation between read and unread tickets

Cons:

1. No Customization — sticks to the standard retro board
2. If backup is not taken after the meeting, you may lose information as session remain active only for a set timeframe
3. No voting
4. No Comments section for taking down actionable inputs
5. No sorting option available

FunRetro.io

“Collaborate with your remote team and get better in what you do with a simple, intuitive and beautiful tool”

Fun Retro is an online tool which comes with variety of options ranging from Free Forever, Team, Business & Enterprise. Free Forever provides three total public boards and 3 public of boards per month. It is simple to use, and one can customize the boards as per his liking or based on few fixed templates. Once you have pinned a retro format, just share the link with you team members and you are ready. The best part of this tool is it allows participants to anonymously vote. People can vote from as low as 1 to 99. It also provides some additional retro controls like hide cards, disable voting, hide vote count, show card’s author etc.

Pros:

1. Variety of subscription options
2. Voting and Sorting of Cards
3. Adding comments
4. Exporting the board in terms of PDF, CSV & PNG
5. Customizable retro board with 80+ predefined templates
6. Multiple language board support
7. Show & Hide of cards
8. Multiple ways to register oneself

Cons:

1. Plans are costly for just what they do
2. No way to segregate read and unread cards
3. Teams feature comes at a cost, till then one needs to work with some work arounds to identify participants
4. No options to export the board in free tier