Today we run our first remote retrospective using http://retrotool.io for cards & http://zoom.us for video conferencing.
The context:
- two people developing remotely,
- after 1,5 week of work, we met to discuss how we are doing
We decided to use the http://retrotool.io. Why this one? Few reasons:
- it is dead simple
- it seems to work
- it is free
We didn’t need any fancy tool with bells and whistles. All we needed was to put our thoughts online so that we both could see it and have a discussion about it. Could we use Google Docs for this? Probably yes, but this one looked nicer so we decided to give it a try.
And how was it? Well, it simply worked! Nothing spectacular, nothing disappointing. It worked as expected.
We decided on a Start/Stop/Continue type of retro (http://retrotool.io has few predefined templates + option to create your own). Before the retro each of us put few cards to the board.
The cards put by different users differ by color so it is easy to spot who added what (probably helpful with a bigger team). There is also a “private space” on the board where you can prepare your cards and later on move to “public space” where everyone can see it.
There is no security of any kind, you share the board by sharing a link. Which is OK for me.
The retro went pretty well, thanks for asking. 🙂 As usual, we started with the facts and then went through all the cards.
Both tools — RetroTool & Zoom — worked just fine. You might give’em a try if you plan to run a remote retrospective.