Reviewing retrospectives

[Phillip Higgins]

After creating many retrospectives, is there a way to then analyse these in one document?

[Rob Woodgate · Accepted solution]

Hi Phillip,

There's no inbuilt mechanism specific to the retro templates, but there are content reporting tools that you can use.  Unfortunately the standard Retro template doesn't include these, so you can retrofit them to pages that have been created or just add them to the template to report on retros from now on.

As an example, you can add the Excerpt macro to the template, and use the Excerpt Include macro to create a page where you compare your chosen retro pages.  Another option is to add a Page Properties macro to the "what went well" and "what could be improved sections", and report on that in a Page Properties Report macro.

To be honest, it's a struggle to report on them because they are almost entirely text.  Apart from reporting the text from different retros onto one page, the options are limited.  If you can metric-ise some aspects of the retro - e.g. "on a scale of 1 - 5 how happy are the team members about this sprint?" - then you can start to do reporting using charts, but text itself is notoriously difficult to report on and compare (and not just in Confluence).

[Luis Ortiz - Catapult Labs]

My team created an add-on for Agile Retrospectives. 

You can keep a record of the retrospectives and compare them. What's helpful in our add-on for this matter, is that you can assign owners to the resulting action items and check them off to have visibility of the progress. 

We are currently working on generating a report, but as @Rob Woodgate mentions, the quantifiable information options are limited.
-What would you like to see in this report?
-What information is measurable and helpful to you?

I'm very interested in your thoughts. Also @Rob Woodgate's.

Check out our add-on and let me know what you think:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/retrospectives4confluence/cloud/overview

Thanks!

[Phillip Higgins]

Hi Rob,

Many thanks for informing me of what is possible. For the future, it seems quite a good idea to give a score rating to a sprint, will look into using this. For the actual comments, I can extract the information, then create a "project review" page to highlight issues raised similar to our weekly sprint retrospective.

[Phillip Higgins]

Hi Rob,

With positive and negative commments added, I was not sure if there was an automatic way to extract that information into a document. I ended up going into each retrospective to extract the data - this took quite a while. Is there an inbuilt mechanism for this?

I would imagine there are recommended best practices to analyse retrospectives, so some advice would be useful. 

[Rob Woodgate]

Hi Phillip,

Can you clarify your question?  For instance, are you asking if there's an inbuilt mechanism for reporting on retrospective pages? Or asking about best practises for analysing retrospectives? Or something else?