Retrospective Extension for Azure DevOps

Retrospectives is an Azure DevOps extension to perform smart and efficient retrospectives from within the Azure DevOps.

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.

Table of Contents

• Retrospectives
  • Retrospective Features
  • Install
  • Use
  • Live Sync Troubleshooting
  • Best Practices
  • Contribute
  • License

Retrospective Features

• 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

Install

The extension can be installed from Azure DevOps Marketplace.

Use

Please note: the screenshot examples use light mode and dark mode interchangeably because both are supported!

1. Open Retrospectives Extension

Navigate to the Azure 'Boards' tab in your account on the left hand navigation. Select the 'Retrospectives' tab under 'Boards'.

2. Pick the Team

You are now on the Retrospectives page. Select your Azure DevOps team from the dropdown in the header. By default, the dropdown displays My Teams — only teams where you are a member.

If you need to access retrospectives from teams where you're not a member, you can toggle to Show All Teams in the Settings menu (see section 7). This displays all teams in the project and relies on board-level permissions to control access to sensitive feedback.

3. Create New Retrospective

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.

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If you have created a retrospective before for your selected team, then you can select "Create a new retrospective" from the navigation drop down.

4. Choose Your Retrospective Settings

When you select Create Board or Create new retrospective as above, you will see the following dialog:

Please enter the appropriate information:

• Retrospective Title: 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.
• Obscure the feedback of others until after Collect phase: When selected, users cannot see other users input until they have moved to another phase. Other users' feedback will be blurred.
• Make participant feedback anonymous: When checked, participant names are hidden on individual feedback items.
• Columns Settings: You can either apply from a pre-populated template or individually select and configure columns yourself.

Notes:

• Retrospective Title is the minimum 'required' information (other fields can stay at default as needed). Once the title is provided, the Save button is enabled. Save the retrospective using the Save button.
• The system will remember your selection for maximum votes, team assessment, obscure feedback, and anonymous feedback when saving and use those setting as your defaults for the next a board you create.
• The Permission tab allows the board owner or team admin to restrict access to the retrospective board by team or by individual. By default the retrospective board is accessible to everyone in the project.

5. Select An Existing Retrospective Board

Once you have created the retrospective board and you want to select a retrospective board different from the currently displayed board, click on the retrospective board name and select the desired one. You can use the search box to find the appropriate retrospective boards if you have a large number of boards.

6. Share the Link to the 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 synchronization, so all users will see the most up-to-date information without having to refresh the page.

7. Adjust User Settings

Use the Settings menu in the header to adjust how teams and boards are displayed:

• Show my teams: Restricts the team selector to teams where you are a member.
• Show all teams: Displays every team in the current project.
• Scroll by column: Supports vertical scrolling within each column to view all feedback.
• Scroll by board: Supports vertical scrolling for the full board to view all feedback.

Caution: Selecting Show all teams can degrade performance in projects with a large number of teams, because the extension must load and filter a much larger team list.

8. Phases of the Standard Retrospective

The number of columns in each retrospective is determined by the selection made when making the new board. Regardless of the te