A few weeks ago, our team participated in RailsRumble, a 48-hour-non-stop programming competition. We named our app Kaigi – Japanese for “business meeting”.
Kaigi helps remote teams running Agile retrospectives. It is completely free and awesome.
Combining Kaigi with a video conference tool will simply do the job. Give it a try!
This is our suggested guide for an efficient Retrospective meeting:
Prepare the agenda taking into account the available time. In this case 50 min. There should always be a limited timespan for a meeting.
- 5 min – Introduction / go over the plan from previous meeting.
- 10 min – Data collection:
- Each member should write down their feelings using simple keywords on stickies.
- Use the Start-Stop-Continue technique.
- Consider: technical stuff, planning, estimates, design, communication, demos, deploys, etc.
- 3 min – Grouping:
- Group together related topics – this will allow to learn from each other’s comments.
- 2 min – Voting:
- Each member has 5 votes.
- Each member will vote for the topics they‘d like to discuss.
- This voting will determine the priority for each topic.
- 25 min – Go over the topics:
- Discuss each item.
- The number of topics that will be discussed depends on the available time.
- For each topic, the moderator will take some notes to discuss in the next phase.
- 5 min – Action plan:
- Create actionable items.
- Every item should have a due date.
- Define the responsible for each individual item. Some items could be for the entire team.
- The next meeting should start by analyzing whether the action items were completed or not.
Each topic that wasn’t discussed during this meeting should be included in a backlog to be reviewed within the next session.
