Retrospectives is an Azure DevOps extension to perform smart and efficient retrospectives from within the Azure DevOps pipeline.
Retrospectives are an important practice in becoming an effective team, allowing the team to gather feedback and continuously improve based on the feedback.
Research from the 2018 State of DevOps report indicates that Elite teams are 1.5 times more likely to consistently hold retrospectives and use them to improve their work. Furthermore, a 2013 meta-analysis on teams indicates that teams that effectively debrief/conduct retrospectives are 20-25% more effective.
Teams often use external retrospective tools, white boards 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.
Please note: the screenshot examples use light mode and dark mode interchangeably because both are supported!
Navigate to the Azure 'Boards' tab in your account on the left hand navigation. Select the 'Retrospectives' tab under 'Boards'.
You are now on the Retrospectives page. Select your Azure DevOps team from the selector in the header.
Create a new retrospective using the 'Create Board' button. If this is your first retrospective for your selected team, then press the "Create Board" button in the center of the screen.
If you have created a retrospective before for your selected team, then you can select "Create a new retrospective" from the navigation drop down.
When you select New Board or Create new retrospective as above, you will see the following dialog:
Please enter the appropriate information:
- Retrospective Title: Enter a title for the Retrospective.
- Max Votes per User: The maximum number of votes a participant has to use in the "Vote" Phase.
- Include Team Assessment: Include a Team Assessment link at the top of the board.
- Only show feedback after Collect phase: When selected, users cannot see other users input until they have moved to another phase. Other users' feedback will be blurred.
- Display 'Retrospective Prime Directive: Include a link to the 'Prime Directive' at the top of the board.
- Do not display names in feedback: When checked, anonymize who creates individual feedback items.
- Columns: You can either Apply from a preselected templates or individually select and configure columns.
Note: 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 board and you want to select a board different from the currently displayed board, click on the board name and select the desired board. You can use the search box to find the appropriate boards if you have a large number of boards.
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.
The number of columns in each retrospective is determined by the selection made when making the new board. Regardless of the template, they still follow the same sequence of five stages.
In this phase the facilitator sets the stage for the retrospective. It is recommended that you click on the Prime Directive and read it out loud for everyone to hear. Remind everyone that any issues that discovered will be assumed to be process problems, not people problems.
In this phase feedback is collected from all participants. Users can add feedback under any of the columns using the 'Add new card' button or by double clicking the empty space of the column's background. Once feedback from all users is collected, move onto the next phase.
If when creating a retrospective, the checkbox for "Do not display names on feedback" is checked, then the cards will show no names, appearing anonymous.
If when creating a retrospective, the checkbox for 'Obscure the feedback of others during the Collect Phase' was checked, then while typing the feedback of others will not be shown, even if anonymous. You can only edit items that you have created in this mode.
In this phase, any similar feedback can be grouped together beneath a "header" or champion item. 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.
If you would rather not drag you can use the feedback item's action menu (the ellipsis '...') to "Group Feedback". This will bring up a search box and you can type in the feedback item you would like to group your selected item under.
Both methods of grouping will result in the item being grouped beneath the other.
Once all similar items are grouped together, move on to the next phase.
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 as the denominator in a ratio of "Votes Used". 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.
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.
You can optionally include a "Team Assessment" that anonymously collects feedback from participants. To get the feedback form, you can click on the "Team Assessment" link at the top of the board. The assessment tracks 5 categories:
- Clarity
- Energy
- Psychological Safety
- Work-life Balance
- Confidence
The users can rank on a scale of 1 to 10; scores of 1-6 are categorized as "Unfavorable", 7 and 8 are "Neutral," and 9 and 10 are "Favorable."
Once the team assessment has been completed, the summary of answers can be viewed in the Retrospective Summary Dialog (see below)
Teams may choose to address the issues found in the team assessment in multiple ways:
- Through open conversations during the standard retrospective process to identify opportunities for improvement.
- While this approach works, it may not be effective if the team isn't psychologically safe, and our research indicates that only 10% of the teams that do team assessments are psychologically safe
- Through a Team Assessment Retrospective
- A Team Assessment Retrospective is a new approach to retrospectives allowing teams to identify the largest opportunities for improvement based on each team members' responses to the team assessment.
- Section 7.1 below outlines the Six Steps in a Team Assessment Retrospective
Create a new retrospective using the steps above with the following exceptions:
- Include Team Assessment is checked
- Do not display names in feedback is checked
- Display 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is checked
- Note: You do not need to select a template. The template will be modified after the assessment is complete
- Share the link to the retrospective with the team
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In this phase the facilitator sets the stage for the retrospective. It is recommended that you click on the Prime Directive and read it out loud for everyone to hear. Remind everyone that any issues that discovered will be assumed to be process problems, not people problems.
In this phase each team member clicks on the Team Assessment and anonymously answers all questions and hits "submit". It is critical that you remind everyone that all feedback is anonymous and confidential.
Throughout this phase you will periodically check the retrospective summary. If the majority of the team hasn't responded to the assessment, close the summary dialog and encourage everyone to participate, reminding them that if their voice isn't expressed in the assessment it can't be acted upon.
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Re-open the retrospective summary and when the majority of the team has responded, discuss which dimension the team would like to improve upon. Note: If more than 20% of the responses are unfavorable for psychological safety, we recommend focusing on psychological safety first. This is because without psychological safety the more difficult conversations that need to happen to make improvements in the other dimensions will not happen.
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Once the team has decided which dimension to focus on the facilitator edits the template by selecting the template aligned to the dimension the team wants to focus on. For example, if the team has decided to improve on psychological safety, then the facilitator will edit the retrospective and choose the "Psychological Safety" template.
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In this phase team members will provide feedback to help improve the dimension they've chosen to focus on
Ask team members to input feedback cards on the left 2 columns.
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After a few moments, the facilitator reads the cards outloud. When it's apparent that no additional feedback cards are being added, the facilitator asks the following question: "Reflecting on the feedback we've collected, if you could take only one action in the next sprint that would yield the biggest improvement on [dimension team is focused on improving from Team Assessment] what would it be? Capture this in a feedback card in the third column (One action in the next sprint)"
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In this phase the team will group similar items together. To expedite the process we recommend only grouping the action items together.
After the majority of the team has added feedback cards to the third column, the facilitator switches to the "group" tab and collectively groups like ideas together with the teeam (see above).
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In this step the facilitator asks participants to vote only on the third column and the top items for improvement are identified.
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The facilitator then waits for votes to compile and after the majority of the team has voted (the facilitator can view the retrospective summary to quickly determine how many votes have beeen cast), the facilitator clicks on the "Act" tab which automatically sorts the cards from the most to the least voted upon.
Follow the steps above to assign actions as work items in Azure Dev Ops. Note: We recommend only selecting 1-2 actions per sprint to ensure completion prior to the next sprint.
The Retrospective Summary dialog is accessable from the "Board Actions" menu in the top navigation.
Once there, there is a summary of the Retrospective. This includes:
- Who created the board
- Number of participants
- If not anonymous, it will show who participated
- Number of feedback items created
- Number of votes cast
- Number of action items created
If there is a team assessment, then a charted summary will show the vote breakdown by favorability, along with an average score.
There may be times that a team may want to reflect on past retrospectives they have run. There is a History tab in the top navigation of the tool, next to "Board" header.
From here, one can look at past retrospectives and see a few high level stats and the action items created after each by clicking the individual retrospective.
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