About Retrodude
What is retrodude?
Retrodude is about getting the most out of your retrospectives. With telecommuting and remote working on the rise, team retrospectives can be hard to organise. It is difficult for remote team members to engage in Kanban techniques, and digital whiteboards are generally rather limiting.
With retrodude, all your responses appear in realtime. Create a retrospective, invite your team and encourage open and honest dialogue. Users can even opt to be anonymous!
Why did you write Retrodude?
Retrodude is here to facilitate retrospectives where team members are in different locations and can't easily share a whiteboard.
I wrote this to scratch an itch. Before Retrodude, people would write down their answers, read them over a skype connection, the scrum master would write it down as well as discussing ways to resolve it.
With retrodude, the scrum master's job is easier, and people have a bit more psychological distance - this can lead to more honest expression, drilling down to the real issues affecting your team.
Is it free?
Absolutely. We pay with this through advertising and plan to introduce extra features - watch this space!
In fact, I feel an advert coming on now. Excuse me...
That's cool. Retrodude is super-awesome, how else can I help?
Why not share retrodude with your agile friends / collegues? You will find share links at the bottom of the homepage!
Is it secure?
No, not really.
All data is stored on Retrodude on the understanding that anyone can access it. All that is needed is your unique session ID, and anyone in the world can access all the data in your retrospective.
(The unique ID has a rather large number of possibilities, but computers are mighty fast.)
Of course, given the brevity of answers and the nature of the retrospective process, this is not usually an issue. It is possible that in the future, we will implement accounts and security. If this would be of interest to you or your company, why not get in touch? Email retrodude at this domain.
Do your recommend Retrodude over whiteboards / cards?
NO. No no no no. No.
Retrodude is here for a special purpose: to help communication when people are locationally challenged. With the increased popularity of telecommuting, it is harder to share the humble whiteboard.
Yet physical paper / pen and whiteboard approaches are still preferred and always will be. There is an ineffable liberation when you use tactile items, not to mention the numerous health benefits of getting your team away from the glare of their monitors for a few minutes. People are more likely to come out of a retrospective feeling refreshed and motivated when they've been "physical".
Where that isn't possible, Retrodude fills the gap.
Wait a minute... we don't do it like this, we use Like / Hate / Smells / Smiles
I recognise that people have vastly different ways of doing retrospectives. Retrodude has selected a couple of formats that work well, but I'm open to new ideas! If you want me to add support for your layout, send an email to retrodude at this domain and I'll see what I can do.
What about other features?
We've tried to keep the tool slimline - it does one thing, and it does it well. However, we're always open to hearing about different features that matter to people, and we've got a todo list for ourselves:
- Use newer technologies (currently does everything with polling, so retro)
- Better graphics (even when this tool was originally written, they were a bit rubbish)
- Nicer palette
- "Me too!" button
- Optional user accounts
However, there's probably a few things we won't be doing - for example:
- Support for tracking "actions": A retrospective is not a planning meeting. Each card on the retrospective represents a feeling, an emotion. Sure, sometimes there's a quick fix to stop things happening again, in which case, you have your own project tracker, right? But you can't fix an emotion, and you shouldn't try. You can't explain it away. Defending bad decisions just makes people feel worse. Instead, use your retrospectives to acknowledge the emotional state of your team. Stop trying to "fix" people. For everything else, use your own project management tools.
- Voting: We're on the fence about this (which is why we have "me too" in our todo list) Voting implies that some emotions are more valid than others. That said, we recognise that some companies only have a limited amount of time for their employee's welbeing, so maybe we should help them prioritise?
If you've got an idea that isn't in the "bad things" list, we'd love to hear it! Send one of those electronic mail thingies to retrodude at this domain.
How do you delete retrospectives?
One of our team members accidentally pasted our latest nuclear weapon designs in their answer (what a silly sausage!) Is there any way of deleting that retrospective?
The first thing to remember is that there is an "Edit my answer" button. If someone has written something inflammatory or sensitive, it's easiest to ask them to edit their answer. That said, if this is not possible then I will happily delete any retrospectives containing sensitive data, just send me an email to retrodude at this domain, with the unique session ID and I will delete that retrospective and all its answers.
It is also worth noting that currently, we have no plans to implement an automatic deletion. We'll see how busy the site gets to determine whether it's worth removing old records. It is possible that we can export them to some kind of archive first.
Terms and conditions
In short, be good to each other, and be kind to us.
By using this site, you accept the tool as-is, and agree neither to infringe on, nor try to infringe on the privacy of others using this site. You will not attempt to disrupt the site or post anything on this site that is illegal, defamatory or otherwise infringes upon the rights of others.
The site owner accepts no responsibility for anything posted or not posted on this site, and offers no warrantees as to the reliability of the service. This is offered as an entirely free service, and the owner shall not be held liable for any disruption caused by people, technology, act of God or by those providing the service and its dependencies.