Retrospectives is an Azure DevOps extension to perform smart and efficient retrospectives from within the Azure DevOps pipeline.
Retrospectives are an important part of the software engineering cycle. Teams often use external retrospective tools, white board with Post-its, OneNote, etc to conduct retrospectives. The data then needs to be collated, and any actionable items need to be created in your Azure DevOps pipeline. The Retrospectives extension allows you to do all this and more from within Azure DevOps.
- Retrospectives in Azure DevOps
- Real time support for distributed retrospectives
- Ability to create Azure DevOps work items associated to feedback
- Create an emailable summary of a retrospective
The extension can be installed from Azure DevOps Marketplace.
- Navigate to the Azure 'Boards' tab in your account. Select the 'Retrospectives' tab under boards.
- This will navigate you to the Retrospectives page. Select your Azure DevOps team from the selector in the header.
- Create a new retrospective using the 'Create Board' button. If you have created retrospectives before, use the selector to go to a particular retrospective, or create a new one using the options button and then clicking on 'Create new board'.
When you select New Board or Create new baord as above, you will see the following dialog:
Please enter the appropriate information:
- Retrospective Title: Enter appropriate text
- Make all feedback anonymous: When you select this checkbox, user identities for the item creators will not be displayed
- Only show feedback after Collect phase: When selected, users cannot see other users input till the Collect phase is completed by moving to another phase
- Max Votes per User (Current 5): This options lets the board creator control how many total votes (across all columns) that each user can have. Default is 5. While this option can be updated through the Edit retrospective option, please note that this update cannot decrement votes already in place.
- Colums: You can either Apply from a preselected templates or individually select and configure columns
Retrospective Title is the minimum 'required' information (other fields can stay at default as needed). Ones the title is provided, the [Save] button is enabled. Save the retrospective using the [Save] button.
Once you have created the retrospective boards and you want to select a board different from the currently displayed board, click on the board name (e.g. Demo board in the image) and select the desired board. You can use the search box to find the appropriate boards if you have a large number of boards.
- If you created a new retrospective in step 3, give your retrospective an appropriate name and click 'Save'. This will create and navigate you to your newly created retrospective.
- Once you create a new retrospective, you can share a link to it to all participants. Users can then access that link even from their mobile browsers to participate in the retrospective. The extension offers real time synchronisation, so all users will see the most upto date information without having to refresh the page.
- Each Retrospective by default has 2 columns, one for things that went well and another for those that did not. Performing a retrospective is divided into 4 phases.
- Collect - In this phase feedback is collected from all participants. Users can add feedback under either of the columns using the 'Add new card' button. Once feedback from all users is collected, move onto the next phase.
- Group - In this phase, the similar feedback is grouped together. If you feel 2 feedback items are similar, drag one onto another to group them together. Dragging any item onto a group, will add items to that group. Once all similar items are grouped together, move on to the next phase.
- Vote - In this phase, participants will individually go through all the feedback items and vote on the ones they feel are important, by clicking on the 'Upvote' icon. Users can reduce their number of votes on a specific item by clicking on the 'Downvote' icon.
Note the Max Votes per User set by the board creator are displayed above the board along with the votes used by the user. Votes used by the user are updated in real time as the user clicks on 'Upvote' and 'Downvote' icons.
Once everyone is done voting, move on to the next phase.
- Act - In this phase, the team will go through each feedback item and create work items in Azure DevOps if needed. Click on the 'Add action item' button on a feedback card, and select the type of work item that needs to be created. This will open up the standard Azure DevOps work item creation form. Enter the work item details and save. This will create the work item in your Azure DevOps account and also associate it to the feedback item.
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