Compare Retrospective Tools

If you tend to like the old school sticky notes and butchers paper solution and don’t mind having to capture and digitize those notes as a separate exercise, then no harm, no foul. This can just be a good reference list if you have a team member who is away, working remotely, dialing in or you just want to change things up to experiment with how it might impact speed, number of ideas, and overall team meeting cadence.

In this table above, I’ve outlined the key features that make an online agile retrospective tool great and compared all the online tools. Some are pretty basic and don’t do much more than replicate the paper-based process of what you might do with the team. Others take it to the extreme where they might be scanning emoticon selection and user input to gauge sentiment (hmm …not sure about that in this regard.)

I’ve also considered some of the needs when Scrum masters run their meetings. Things like being, providing extra data or value to the retrospective process, fitting the credos of Agile, and having a range of facilitator features to make the experience less time-consuming and pain-free. Integration is another key component that my company asked for as you want to not just capture action items but also push them into your workflow, so that was a key decider in which tool to use. – Jason.