Project Retrospective using Mingle

Last week, we conducted an iteration retrospective for the project that I am currently working, for a client based in Perth. Since we are a distributed team with the analysis team in Perth and the development team being based out of Melbourne, we used Mingle to do our Iteration Retrospective. I have conducted a few face-to-face retrospectives myself and it works fine. But this was my first experience being part of a distributed project team retrospective and we used Mingle to help us with the same.

Why did we use Mingle? Mingle as a tool is best suited for collaborative discussions within a distributed team. It can be easily set-up for anonymous feedback, which can then be discussed either through teleconferencing or video conferencing. The whole process took us about an hour and was a pretty successful exercise (except for some minor glitches we had with the voice, since we used Skype for the teleconference call).

The rules we followed during the retrospective session were the standard rules being:
- It’s not a blame game – provide constructive feedback to help the team move ahead
- One conversation at a time

We started the retrospective by hooking up to the Melbourne office on a teleconference line (Skype). Each of us also had logged into the Project Retrospective instance within Mingle. We then decided to use the next 10 minutes to enter our feedback within the Retro wall. The Retro wall had the below 6 categories and each of us could enter our feedback into any of the categories (without any particular order):
- Do less of
- Do more of
- Keep doing
- Start doing
- Stop doing
- Puzzles

The Retro wall was setup to accept feedback anonymously and thus no names were published against any of the feedback(s). After confirming that everyone had finished entering their feedback, we began discussing the feedback for each of the categories. Some of the feedback was quite self explanatory, while the rest required further discussion (Usually the person who wrote a particular feedback would expand on it and the rest of the team would add to the discussion as required). At the end of the discussion session, we voted on the items that each of us felt needed more discussion or needed an action item against the same (again, voting can be done anonymously using Mingle). At the end of the retrospective session, we had collected a few action items, with names assigned against each of them. I thought it was a pretty successful retrospective!