About Retromat

Short version:
Retromat generates random plans for agile retrospectives: Out of a pool of many activities it selects 1 for each of the 5 phases. Use the arrows to exchange activities and make sure that all 5 activities fit together. (They are unlikely to fit together in the initial random plan.)

Long version:
Retrospectives are my favorite agile meeting. I’m constantly on the lookout for new ideas. On paper the excellent “Agile Retrospectives” is the de-facto-standard on the topic. But on the internet there was no such go-to website (that I knew of). The Retrospective Wiki had the potential, but you couldn’t get a new account anymore and it stopped evolving. So I used to browse around to come up with a basic plan for a retrospective that I then refined.

Retromat_Screenshot

I found myself wishing for a simpler way to get started, a kickstarter so to speak. And after 2 weeks of vacation I present to you – the amazing – the awesome – the fabulous – Retromat. It provides you with a random plan, ready to refine. It covers 5 phases, as laid out in “Agile Retrospectives“. Each plan has an ID so you can easily share ideas with fellow facilitators. Retromat is meant to inspire and shake up routine.

The starting version had 16 only activities, but by now (June ’16) it has more than 120 and I’m still adding more. Many of the activities come with photos of how flip charts and boards look.

Here’s the Trello board with all currently planned features. The code is public on github and that’s also where you can report bugs.

Retromat has been translated to French, Spanish, German and Dutch. If you’d like to help translate it into your native language, check out the github readme.

Anything else you’d like to know? Mail me 🙂
Also write me, if you’d like to contribute to Retromat. I’d like forRetromat to be more robust than the Retrospective Wiki.

PS: Thank to Emma Alvarez for the beautiful background patterns.

PPS: Interested in retrospectives? Sign up to the Retromat newsletter to get related news and tricks!

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