Retrospectives

Every team after the the sprint have to have time to reflect on the finished release. This type of the meeting is very popular in Agile development and is called a retrospective meeting or retro. It allows a team and all team members to highlight and discuss about success and failures of the project, identify the areas to improve in terms of the project development or management.

Agile Toolbox for Jira is a missing part of the Jira Software. The plugin gives the functionality of preparing and processing this type of the meeting both offline and online, in the real time.

Opening retrospectives section

Retrospectives are defined in the scope of the project board. Thanks to that each team with a separate project board can define own retrospectives.

Each user who has an access to the project board has permission to create the retrospective meeting definition.

Defining new retrospective

By pressing “New retrospective” button user is redirected to the configuration view

The configuration view consist of the following elements:

1. Actions - user can return to the retrospective list view and discard the changes by pressing “Cancel” button or saved the configuration by pressing “Save” button.

2. Retrospective name - mandatory field

3. Anyone can edit - if selected then anyone can edit, delete, archive the retrospective

4. The template list - the plugin contains a definition of some of the most popular column list used in the retro meetings ( see Pic 4) . The user can choose one and the he can save it or adjust the column configuration to his needs (Pic 5)

5. Add new column - user can add a new column

6. Add new column - user can add a new column, action displayed only if there are no columns defined

Main view

When the retrospective is defined all team members can join to the meeting and participate by creating new cards, voting on the others cards ( created by the team members).

The meeting can be performed both ways: online - when all team members connecting to the meeting at the same time, or offline, each team member is opening the refinement on his local time zone, put some notes, voting.

Main screen of the retrospective view have the following actions

• Refresh the refinements (1)

• Switch to the “Archived retrospectives” view (2)

• Creates the new retrospective (3)

• Delete the retrospective (7)

• Archive the retrospective ( 8 )

• Change the configuration (9)

• Join to the refinement (10)

Additional information

The retrospective configuration view contains also the following information

• The name of the retrospective (4)

• The owner who created the configuration (5)

• The list of the issues created from the retrospective cards as a links - (6)

Archived view

All archived retrospectives are moved to the “archived section”. Anyone can view the archived retrospective but can’t change/add/remove the messages. The only allowed action is a “delete retrospective” action

Retrospective board

Retrospective board allows users to adding notes, voting, moving notes between columns, creating Jira issues from the note. All the team need to perform a productive retro meeting. All changes on the board are reflected in the real time.

Legend:

1. The list of the users jointed to the board and online

2. Button allowing to add new message to the column

3. Voting button - allows to vote on the note and displays the number of the votes

4. The list of users voted on this notes

5. Displays the user who created or updated the note

6. Note content. When pressed can be edited

7. The button deleting the note

8. The button opening the “Jira issue create dialog” with the note content set in the description. Allows quickly prepare Jira issues based on the notes for example: action items

9. Display the issue key as a link to the issue created from the note

10. The button returning to the retro list view