Best practices for Retrospectives with Jira

[Nataliya_Naydenova]

What are some best practices for conducting sprint/team retrospectives using Jira and/or Confluence?

I want to compare different options and tools and would love to hear from the community.

[Alexey Pavlenko _App Developer_]

Hi @Nataliya_Naydenova ,

Since you are still an active user, and, as far as I can see, yet haven't chosen the best solution. I'd like to propose you the app I've developed - Multi-team Scrum Metrics & Retrospective.

This app offers:

1. In-place retrospectives and drill-downs from higher-level periods (years, half-years, quarters, or months) to lower-level periods, helping you understand how top-level metrics are constructed.
   
   
2. Auto-generated reports with pie charts and tables, including:

• Team Comparison Report
• Period Comparison Report
• Non-comparison Team Retrospective Report

Additionally, these reports can group teams, making them ideal for SoS/SAFe/etc. retrospectives:

• Compare groups of teams, such as Team 1 and Team 5 as one entity versus Team 3 and Team 4 as another.
• Compare periods, like 2024 vs. 2023 for the combined Team 1 and Team 5.

Best regards,
Alexey Pavlenko

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @Nataliya_Naydenova ,

Welcome to the Community! I personally like Trello to conduct retrospectives. This article has good insights: 

https://medium.com/@redheadjessica/a-step-by-step-guide-to-using-trello-for-team-retrospectives-da327daf7e47

And this is a template:

https://trello.com/templates/engineering/sprint-retrospective-template-trello-hkaQsLWx

[Tenille _ Easy Agile]

Hi @Nataliya_Naydenova 

Tenille here from Easy Agile. We make an app for Jira called Easy Agile TeamRhythm designed to help agile teams to improve their ways of working. We link retrospectives with your work in Jira; you can turn a retro action item into a Jira issue in just a few clicks, which is automatically saved on your backlog so that you refine it when you next refine your backlog and sequence the issue in your next sprint planning ceremony.  

TeamRhythm itself is built around a User Story Map that you can use for planning your work (sprint/version planning, user story mapping, backlog refinement), and retrospective boards that sit side by side.   

If you’d like to check it out, you can jump into our sandbox demo here: https://go.easyagile.com/TRdemo

I’ll also share a retrospective workshop that we ran with Chris Stone (The Virtual Agile Coach) a few months ago that you might find interesting. It’s product agnostic - so not specific to Jira - but Chris has such a wonderful approach to retrospectives. It was a live workshop but we’ve made the recording available on demand: https://www.easyagile.com/events/retrospective-chris-stone/

Good luck with your search; I'm sure you'll get some great responses here.

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Cheers

Tenille

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Nataliya_Naydenova and welcome to the Community!

Best practice questions are often a bit difficult to position, definitely when you bring tooling in the picture.

But in this specific case, when comparing Jira to Confluence to manage retrospectives, go with Confluence. Confluence has a ready made template to help you run and document the retro at the same time. You can tweak it to a different format if you would like to run a different style of retrospective.

Most importantly: Jira is designed to define, plan and complete tasks essentially. Once they are done, they intentionally disappear from view so you can focus on the next things that need to be done. That is exactly the opposite of why you would hold a retrospective: to learn lessons that hopefully stick. Confluence, by nature, is a much better fit for that.

"But wait, I want to track tasks we define during a retrospective afterwards", If those require a bit of follow-up, that may indeed be a got time to create issues in Jira for them for further tracking of the required work.

As a bonus, you could use whoteboards or a Trello board to facilitate the retrospective workshop itself. Tools like that allow you to model a canvas to create and organise cards on in a pretty free format. The Atlassian platform lets you embed a lot of external content in Confluence using smart links (i.e. pasting a url to content creates a rich content representation automatically that can often be configured to your liking.

Hope this helps!