Software Developer
Designer
Run productive remote Agile Retrospectives on Whiteboards
Collaborative environment with all tools and features needed for your team to run their retrospective sessions efficiently. Reflect on the past tasks, successes, or hiccups to improve future work.
Integration with Jira
Import Jira cards to your collaborative board to add context to your conversation. Send new action items to Jira as issues to not forget about them.
Collaborative environment
Whiteboards are a highly collaborative environment, crucial for retrospectives. Presentation mode, voting, timer, and more features to make the most out of your meetings.
Anti-boring options
Use GIFs, videos, or hand drawings to bring some fun to your sessions as a part of warming up exercises before retros.
Ready-to-use templates
Whiteboards come with a set of retrospective templates to a hassle-free start with the tool.
Integration with Jira
Import Jira cards to your collaborative board to add context to your conversation. Send new action items to Jira as issues to not forget about them.
Collaborative environment
Whiteboards are a highly collaborative environment, crucial for retrospectives. Presentation mode, voting, timer, and more features to make the most out of your meetings.
Anti-boring options
Use GIFs, videos, or hand drawings to bring some fun to your sessions as a part of warming up exercises before retros.
Ready-to-use templates
Whiteboards come with a set of retrospective templates to a hassle-free start with the tool.
Project Manager
Run your Retrospectives
Effectively with a Fleshed Out
Plan That Helps You Meet Your
Goals
Treat retros as clearing-the-air sessions
Discuss problems during video calls and share opinions with your teammates using comments without blaming each other for minor mistakes or hiccups. Encourage everyone to give feedback and create a comfortable environment for online collaboration.
Opt for open, collaborative sessions
Bring your team closer together by helping each member voice their opinions and observations in a transparent and communicative way. Uplift your team’s morale by collaborative voting on the most essentials tasks and work items.
Identify issues before they escalate
Retros will serve as an excellent tool for spotting risks and problems. Allow your team members to share their opinions openly and point out issues in the processes. Remedy them by introducing small, incremental changes that ultimately can lead to more impactful outcomes for your projects.
Improve your processes continuously
Embrace constant improvement to your processes by proposing solutions to identified issues or problems. Over time, you’ll improve the effectiveness of your team as well as each sprint and result in unique outcomes.
Designer
Useful Features for Your Retrospectives
Templates
We’ve prepared a simple retro template for experienced teams as well as a template with guidance for facilitator teams who don’t have enough experience in running retrospectives. Need more? Create your own template!
Guest Access
Need to invite external contractors or consultants to your retrospective events? Not a problem! The guest access feature is here for you.
Connection with Jira
Easily convert cards on your whiteboard into Jira issues. Assign who is responsible for tasks, set due dates, and be sure that your teammates can clearly see your session’s outcomes.
Creativity Boosters
Use the free draw feature, import GIFs and images to warm up your team, and make them feel creative and engaged.
Collaboration Helpers
Use a timer to limit some activities and voting options to gather feedback effectively.
Backup and Export
Don’t lose the results of your teamwork thanks to backing up and saving your boards.
One stop shop for all your team activities
Running Retrospectives
best Practices
What are Agile retrospectives?
Continuous improvement is one of the pillars of Agile culture.
Getting feedback from end-users, discussing estimates, and many more techniques help you make your team more effective with every iteration. However, one of the most important ceremonies for this is retrospective..
Retrospective meetings allow your team to review their past successes and mistakes to improve their work continuously. During retro, teams:
- Help each other to retrieve all important details, analyze them, and assess how their last iteration went;
- Identify what went well and what needs to be improved;
- Create an action plan together.
How to run retrospectives?
There are plenty of different formats of retrospective sessions. Even in Whiteboards, you can find at least two templates for your sessions. Nevertheless, some aspects of retros should stay untouched.
Plan when you have retrospectives
In the case of SCRUM, retrospectives are the usual event at the end of each sprint. Other teams may also have it as a bi-weekly or monthly meeting, but regularity is critical.
Moreover, you might want to have additional occasional retrospectives after finishing some big projects or activities. For example, a marketing team can run the recently completed ad campaign retrospective to improve their work next time.
Decide who should attend your meetings
Everyone from your team should participate in a retro event. You can also invite people from other departments involved in the iteration/project you review but make sure it won’t ruin the safety atmosphere necessary for such events.
A facilitator should support every retrospective. It can be your scrum master or anyone from the team and the role can be rotated. To help freshly-backed people, our Whiteboards templates contain guidance and tips on how to facilitate the retro.
Discuss both successes and things to improve
It is critical to start your retrospective on a positive note.
Help your team to recall and recognize all the good things that happened during the period you revise.
After this, talk about things that were difficult, unpleasant, or didn’t go as planned. Be focused on pure facts, so then you can ask, “How can we improve/fix this?”
Sometimes teams raise a lot of issues. In this case, the voting feature in Whiteboards will help you to prioritize items easily.
Turn items into action points
When you have prioritized things to improve, it is time to turn them into actionable items. With the Whiteboards app, you can transform cards on your board into Jira issues, so you will not lose them.
Don’t bore your team with retrospectives
Don’t let your retrospectives become yet another type of boring meeting.
Whiteboards give you plenty of options to make your retros interesting and valuable. Here are some additional suggestions:
- Practice warm-up exercise before your meetings;
- Run retrospectives of your retrospectives;
- Use GIFs, embedded videos, drawings, colorful cards, and images to enable your team’s creativity and add something new to every meeting;
- Change templates and retrospectives techniques as soon as your team is bored with the approach you use.
Try Whiteboards for your retrospectives — perfect solution for remote collaboration.
Whiteboards