What's new 19/20
December 2020
Enterprise - User report
Enterprise admins can now download a Users report with names, emails, organization roles, team memberships, last seen timestamps and other key details...
Download health check responses
You can now download the individual responses (rating and comments) in CSV or XLSX format at the end of a health check. The health check anonymity applies to this report, so "Reveal Participants Individual Ratings" must be enabled during the meeting in order to see participant names.
You can access the new report from the SHARE screen Download > Individual Responses.
Bug fixes
- Fixed issue where the decimal points on health check scores may not be rounded correctly (IEEE 754 floating point math)
- Fixed sort order of dimension columns in health check reports
- Updated sort order of health history in health check PDF report to match app interface
PDF rendering performance improvements
PDF rendering of retrospective / health check / team reports has been improved with greater performance and smaller file sizes.
General tweaks and improvements
- Based your feedback (thanks!) we've made a number of tweaks:
- Team health checks overview (enterprise) now allows you to show or hide teams from the SHOW menu
- Retrospective topics and topic descriptions support simple markdown and inline links
- Idea, action and health dimension comments now indicate when they were added
- Date picker respects locale settings for first day of week
- Dates are now presented in locale-appropriate format
- Display number of ideas added by each participant in the sidebar during the brainstorm step (visible to everybody if anonymity is off)
- Health check history download options have been made more obvious at the end of health check meetings
- Actions previously published to Jira, Trello etc. can be unpublished at any time if you prefer to track status in TeamRetro. Select Undo Publish from the action drop down menu.
- Sharing actions in a PROGRAM will now list all users who are members of the program or one of the program teams
November 2020
Fix "Present"/"Not Present" list
We've fixed an issue where participants who viewed a retrospective or health check after it was completed were marked as present.
New retrospective templates
We've added some additional standard retrospective templates - What? So What? Now What?, MoSCoW, Rose, Bud, Thorn, KALM and Scrum Values. Like to see a specific template offered? Please let us know!
Capability matrix health checks
In addition to the existing emoticon and numeric health checks, you can now define a "capability matrix" where score is given a specific definition. This functionality allows organizations to define comprehensive capability models (such as agile, development, dev ops capability models) and track their evolution over time. We'll be extending this functionality in future with some built-in models, in the meantime you can create your own under Organization > Settings > Health Checks.
General health check improvements
Based your feedback we've extended our health check functionality:
- Add optional min/max labels for existing emoticon and numeric health checks
- Clicking again on a health check rating will deselect it
- Option to reveal individual participant ratings
Support for ~~simple~~ inline **markdown**
We've made it easier for you to express yourself!. In addition to the existing 👍:emoji: and GIF support, TeamRetro now supports inline markdown for:
- Retrospective ideas and groups
- Retrospective topic descriptions
- Health check dimension names / descriptions
- Comments
- Actions
Markdown options include:
- **bold** or *bold*
- _italic_
- ~~strike-through~~
- `code`
Retrospective / health check comments report
You can now download a report of all retrospective / health check comments and the end of your meeting. From the Share step, just click the Download button and select Comments XLSX or CSV.
October 2020
Tweak "Sort by who added" option behavior
Removed requirement for avatars to be shown prior to "Sort by who added" being enabled.
Single sign on
Support multiple identity provider signing certificates, and improved request signing error handling.
Use Gravatar for default user names / avatars
Populate newly added user profiles with their Gravatar profile display name and avatar (if available). This feature can be disabled under organization security settings.
Unlimited votes option
You can now choose to allow all participants unlimited votes during the voting step, not just the facilitator (just select infinity ∞).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
We've made a number of database and UX performance improvements to make TeamRetro smoother and more responsive.
- Fix issue where downloading a report disables other links (until page refresh)
September 2020
Confluence integration - add page name prefix
You can now specify a page name prefix to add to exported Confluence reports, useful if multiple teams are publishing to the same Confluence space.
- Bug fixes, performance improvements and tweaks IMPROVEMENT
Tweak behavior of comment and idea inputs - any comments or ideas will be automatically saved if facilitator advances meeting
Improve rendering performance in retrospectives
- Add "Open in new tab" option when right clicking on teams, retrospectives or health checks
- Increase the limit on the number of repositories offered when configuring Github integration
- Add internal support for SAML identity providers nameId mappings (allowing migration to new NameID schemes)
- Fix identity provider entity ID validation - accept all valid URIs
- Improve error handling for Single Sign On (surface errors returned by identity providers)
August 2020
Retrospective context
You can now "set the stage" for your retrospectives by providing context - this content will be presented to your team members when they first join a retrospective or health check, and can be called up anytime by clicking the info button in the header
- Rich text formatting - add headings, paragraphs, quotes, lists, and links to other content
- Presets including The Prime Directive (in multiple languages)
Health check management improvements
We've made a number of improvements to the team health check interface:
- All health checks are visible by default on the Team Health page (no need to select model first)
- Start Health Check dialog allows you to choose / switch between health check templates with previews
- Health Check templates can be explicitly managed at the team or organization level
ENTERPRISE Team member tagging
Enterprise customers can now opt for team-member tagging support. After you've defined your tags and categorized your team members, you can filter health check reports by tag. Interested in this feature? Let us know!
Retrospective topic descriptions
You can now add descriptions for your retrospective topics - these will appear below the topic title
Support Google Login in EU Environment
Bug fixes, performance improvements and tweaks
- Improve rendering performance of retrospective history
- Increase maximum number of Github repositories listed in the integration settings
- Increase maximum number of Confluence spaces listed in the integration settings
- Increased size of retrospective topic images
- For complex team health reports, show more of the team health table (even if this means breaking into the margins)
July 2020
Confluence integration
You can now publish your retrospective or health check meeting summaries to your team's Confluence space - including:
- Who was present / not present
- What action items were created
- Snapshot of the retrospective canvas / health check radar
- TeamRetro PDF report attachment
Your team administrator can configure integrations on the Team > Settings > Integrations screen
Retrospective templates
You can now explicitly define your own retrospective templates either for your team, or at an organization level for all teams!
- To create a team-level template: Team > Settings > Retrospectives screen
- To create a organization-level template: Organization > Settings > Retrospectives screen
Explicit retrospective / health checks dates
You can now specify the date of your meetings (not just set it to today)
Redesigned health radar
We've redesigned the health radars to make them easier and clearer to read. Let us know what you think!
Line breaks in ideas, comments and actions
You can now add a line breaks in ideas, comments or actions by pressing SHIFT + RETURN (note: RETURN alone still submits the content).
Facilitators can move ideas around in any retrospective step
We've tweaked the behaviour to allow facilitators to move ideas in any step of the retrospective, enabling different activity types such as lean coffee and making it easier to keep your board organized.
Ideas keep colour from the brainstorm step
If ideas are moved after the brainstorm step, the color and topic association will remain unchanged
Bug fixes and tweaks
- "Exit health check" now takes you your team health page, rather than the retrospectives page
- Navigation drawer in meetings now links back to organization and team pages
- Improve visibility of dialog tabs - larger font and use accent colour to encourage interaction
- More sensible default colors for Mad Sad Glad template
- More sensible default colors for Four Ls template
- Integration guides are now linked from the Team > Settings > Integrations page
June 2020
Microsoft Teams integration
You can now link your TeamRetro team to your channel in Microsoft Teams!
- Invite participants to a retrospective/health check
- Post retrospective/health check actions
- Post your open team action items
Your team administrator can configure integrations on the Team > Settings > Integrations screen
Bug fixes and improvements
- Fix issue with PDF reports where character spacing was inconsistent
- Fix issue preventing right-click for spelling suggestions
Verified emails
Email verification has been enabled by default for new TeamRetro accounts and the first time users join via an invite code or link.
Improved timer functionality
You can now set any arbitrary duration in the step timer, and quickly add or remove additional time if you team needs it.
Disabled auto-submit on blur for ideas and comments
We've disabled automatic submission of ideas and comments when the user moves focus to better support translation, spell-checking and grammar plugins.
Region switch on login page
Login page now indicates which TeamRetro region (US/EU) you are currently viewing. If you are interested in EU hosting, please get in touch!
Health radar visualization now visible in health check summary
Completed health check meetings now show the health radar visualization.
May 2020
Support for multiple single sign-on SAML identity providers
Enterprise customers can now add additional identity providers to their account (ideal if you are sharing your account with another organization, for example a client).
Flexible permissions
You can now grant your team members permission to start new retrospectives, health check meetings or invite new team members; or grant non-admin users the ability to create teams.
- Team permissions can be found under Team > Settings > Permissions
- Organization permissions can be found under Organization > Admin > Security
Share actions to those with assigned actions
You can now opt to share actions items to team members who currently have action items assigned.
Bug fixes
- Fix issue where app may become unresponsive in some circumstances if a topic is removed after a retrospective is already underway
- Fix redirects after SAML login
- Fix to correctly display hyperlinks with multiple query parameters
- Fix to CSV exporting ensure commas are encoded correctly
April 2020
Collect comments during health check survey step
While you complete the a health check survey, participants now have the opportunity to add comments which will be displayed in the subsequent Discuss step. This feature can be disabled in the meeting options.
Bug fixes
- Fix: Only allow a facilitator to remove their own facilitator role if there is another facilitator in the meeting
Report improvements
- Reactions are now visible in retrospective reports
- Retrospective / health check summaries can optionally be download with all comments included
- Team action summaries include all action comments by default
Hide team list
You can how optionally hide the list of teams in your organization, so members only see teams they have been explicitly invited to join. This setting can be found under Organization > Settings > Security
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Fix: Presentation mode in health check meetings
- Fix: Support custom organization subdomains when posting meeting invites to Slack
- Fix: Participants can edit group titles if permission is set to "Everyone can group"
- Fix: Participants can use idea search and group related ideas if permission is set to "Everyone can group"
- Fix: Improved synchronization when multiple facilitators are participating in the same retrospective or health check
UI Tweaks
- Improvement: Made topic images visually stronger
- Improvement: Improved scalability of back end services
- Improvement: Terminology tweaks - "Show in next step" rather than "Reveal in next step"
- Improvement: Change default group suggestion mode to "Show suggested groups within topics"
Improved internal US - EU data migration tooling
We've improved our tooling to transfer enterprise customer accounts between our US and EU environments to speed up onboarding processes. If you are interested in opting for European Union hosting please get in touch at info@teamretro.com!
March 2020
Performance and stability improvements
With current world events (please stay safe everyone) we've seen a dramatic burst in traffic over the last day or so. We've been working hard to ensure TeamRetro keeps up. There has been a few stability issues as we've been scaling up, but we're making good progress.
- Substantial improvements to meeting load and refresh queries and reduced data payload size
- Substantial improvements to team load queries and reduced data payload size
- Reduced chattiness of client
- We've brought online additional dynos (servers)
- We've scaled up our database services
- We're continuing to fine tune application performance
A huge heartfelt thanks and best wishes from us, and please reach out if you have any ideas on how we can better help you or your teams in these uncertain times.
Sort order updated in retrospective brainstorm step
When brainstorming with "reveal in next step" enabled, any ideas you've added will appear at the top of the list to make it easier to keep track of what you've added.
Raised additional team limits for self subscription
The additional team limits on the Large Organization plan have been raised to provide more flexibility:
- 6 + 34 = 40 teams on the Large Organization with monthly billing
- 6 + 14 = 20 teams on the Large Organization with yearly billing
If you need more - please get in touch and we can discuss options
Bug fixes
Resolve Firefox rendering issue
Guest participants (enterprise plans)
Facilitators on an enterprise plan can now invite guest participants to participate in retrospectives or health checks. Unlike regular participants, guests only have access to a specific meeting activity and cannot access the team or organization pages.
Manage roles in anonymous meetings
Previously it could be difficult reassigning the facilitator role when running anonymous or semi-anonymous meetings - since it wasn't possible to identify a particular user to change their role. It is now possible to view the full list of non-anonymized invited users in the "Invite Team" dialog and update their meeting roles.
Copy comment to actions
You can now quickly convert a group or health dimension comment into a new team action in the discuss step - just right click or tap the dropdown button and select "Copy to action".
Idea and comment reactions 👍 👎 ❤️ 🎉 👏 😀 😮 🤔 😡 😢
(optional) Enable comment reactions to quickly give your team new ways of expressing themselves
Comment GIFs
(optional) Enable comment GIFs to give your team new ways of expressing themselves via Tenor animated GIFs
Minor tweaks and improvements
- Anonymity settings default to the last used when creating a new meeting
- Comments on ideas can be enabled or disabled
- Bug fix: Correctly display action item comments when reviewing in meetings
- Bug fix: Correct color scale issue manifesting in some health check PDF reports
February 2020
Jira Server integration
Improved support for Jira Server custom fields
Bug fixes and performance improvements
Resolve issue preventing meeting facilitator who was not a team admin from inviting new meeting participants
Health checks - radar visualization for emoji-style health checks
The radar visualization of health check scores will now be shown for both emoji-style 😊😐🙁 as well as numeric health checks.
Team health reports
- Team-level health reports are accessible to team members and organization admins on all plans
- Health check results can now be downloaded in XLS or CSV format at the end of a Health Check meeting
- Historical results can now be downloaded in XLS or CSV format on the Team > Health page
Allow multiple-line health check dimension descriptions
Line breaks in health check dimension descriptions will now be displayed as expected
Bug fixes and performance improvements
Including improved performance of meeting/team summary email sending
Jira Server integration
Improved support for earlier versions of Jira Server. Tested against 8.0.2, 8.5.0 and 8.6.2.
Fix to organization level health models
You can now create and edit health models at the organization level (an issue preventing earlier updates has been fixed)
Jira Server integration
You can now publish action items to your private Jira Server instance (not just hosted Jira Cloud) Your team administrator can configure integrations on the Team > Settings > Integrations screen
January 2020
SAML improvements
- Single Log Out (SLO) - If you optionally specify an identity provider Single Log Out (SLO) URL, your users will be signed out of both TeamRetro AND their identity provider after clicking on "Sign Out".
- Logout Redirection - The post-logout redirection URL has been changed to the TeamRetro homepage - addressing an issue where users were automatically signed in again when they were redirected back to custom domain login pages.
See which retrospective / health check actions came from
Actions show the title of the retrospective or health check where the action was first added (eg. "Sprint 2"). If the original retrospective / health check is deleted or the action was created directly in the team action list; the date added will be shown.
Review actions plan with ideas
You can now view your team action plan in retrospectives grouped by idea.
Bug fixes and performance improvements
December 2019
Enterprise - Organization reports
We've introduced a number of reports designed provide Organization Admins insight into how your teams are using TeamRetro (while maintaining their safety and privacy)
- Team Statistics - understand how often your teams are using TeamRetro, how many action items they've created / are open and participation rates in retrospectives and health checks.
- Retrospective Statistics - insight into the retrospective format used, as well as statistics on participation, ideas, votes, comments and actions.
- Health Check Statistics - insight into the health model used, as well as statistics on participation, ratings, comments and actions.
Enterprise - Team health overview
Organization and program admins can now view or download a overall snapshot of how teams are doing with our Team Health snapshots view.
Enterprise - Teams of teams - Programs
We're excited to introduce the notion of a program. TeamRetro programs behave much like a normal team however you can also assign existing teams as members:
- Run a retrospective or health check that spans multiple teams
- Generate reports on subsets of your teams
We're looking to expand the program functionality, including scaled retrospectives. Have an idea on how this can help you? Let us know!
Easier to invite users to join your organization, teams or meetings
Autocompletion is now available while selecting users, and you can specify the specific roles those users should have when they've joined (eg. join a retrospective as facilitator).
Emojis picker for comments 😄😄😄️
You can now access the emoji picker when adding comments to ideas, actions or health check dimensions
Bug fixes and performance improvements
November 2019
Improved support for old browsers (IE11)
Jira Cloud integration improvements
We've enhanced our Jira Cloud integration to provide more flexibility:
- Optionally select a Component to assign new issues to (can be required in some Jira configurations)
- Customize a default Label for new issues
- Any due dates set in TeamRetro prior to publishing will appear in the issue Description
- Any assignments set in TeamRetro prior to publishing will appear in the issue Description
Remote Team Happiness health check template
Introducing the Remote Team Happiness health check template - a culture and happiness 'pulse check' for distributed and remote teams. This health check addresses Role clarity, Autonomy, Impact, Engagement, Support, Connectedness, Psychological safety and Personal well-being.
Rendering performance improvements
Rendering performance has been improved when there are a large number of action items visible on the screen
October 2019
Emojis!! 😄😄😄️
It's now easier than ever to express yourself with emojis in your ideas or comments:
- Simple emoji such as :) :D :'( will be auto-replaced with the appropriate emoji-character 🙂😄😢
- Emoji short-codes such as :happy: offer auto-complete and will be auto-replaced with the emoji character 😄
- An emoji picker is available on the right hand side on the new idea input
Vote step - improved picker, limit one vote per idea option
We've improved the facilitator controls in the voting step - it's now easier to pick how many votes each participant should have, and you can opt to limit participants to one vote per idea.
Rendering performance improvements
Rendering performance has been dramatically improved for both Safari and Edge Chromium, particularly when there are a large number of ideas visible
Retrospective / health check statistics
On the final screen of your retrospective or health check you'll now see some key statistics from the meeting:
- How many ideas and comments were captured
- How many votes were cast
- How many new actions were identified
- Average rating was across all health check dimensions
- Participation rate (%)
Any other stats you'd like to see here? Let us know!
Performance improvements
Real-time synchronization performance has been improved
Improved user management
It's now easier to manage your organizations users and team members
- Quickly update user roles
- See which teams a user is a member of on the organization users list
- See when a user was last active in TeamRetro
- Search for users by name, email or team
Performance improvements and bug fixes
September 2019
Dedicated European Union (EU) hosting option
We've publicly launched our EU hosting option for enterprise customers. All your TeamRetro data can be safely stored-in and served-from from EU-based data-centers, rather than our standard US-based data-centers. If you're interested in learning more drop us a line!
Threaded comments
Team members can now reply to action and idea comments by clicking the reply arrow next to the comment bubble.
Azure DevOps / Team Foundation Studio Integration
Publish action items to Azure DevOps / Team Foundation Studio as work items
New built-in retrospective templates
We've added two new retrospective templates. Know of any other templates you'd like us to add? Let us know!
- FLAP - Future Considerations, Lessons Learned, Accomplishments, Problem Areas
WRAP - Wishes, Risks, Appreciations, Puzzles
Organization admin extra permissions
Organization admins can now edit the roles of team members, for example assign additional team administrators
August 2019
Numeric health checks and health radar
Health checks now allow your team to rate each health dimension 1..n, and will present a radar-style visualization of the results on the discuss and summary pages. Let us know what you think!
Improved emoji support
Fixed an issue preventing emojis from being displayed correctly after synchronization
Improved timer synchronization
More robust approach to time synchronization, to ensure an incorrect local clock does not impact the countdown timer
Improved PDF report rendering
PDF reports no longer show groups collapsed by default, instead all ideas will be visible.
New and improved integrations with your favorite task management tools
Is your team already using an app for task management? Rather than tracking your TeamRetro action items separately, you can now publish your actions through to your preferred tool.
- Jira - publish action items as Jira Issues
- Trello - publish action items as Trello Cards
- Github - publish action items as Github Issues
- Asana - publish action items as Asana Tasks
- Basecamp - publish action items as Basecamp Todos
Your team administrator can configure integrations on the Team > Settings > Integration screen
July 2019
Team health checks
Run a health check with your team:
- Use our standard Team Health Model, the Squad Health Check model (by Spotify) or create your own
- Survey your team along key dimensions such as delivering value, fun, communication etc.
- Discuss each dimension with your team and capture action items
- Track how your team evolves over time
Redesigned facilitator header
We've simplified the facilitator header that appears while you are running a retrospective or health check:
- More screen space for your ideas and discussion
- Improved mobile layout
- Distraction-free!
Improved step timer
We've simplified the step timer to show a minutes/second countdown (0:00), and it's now more attention grabbing when time has elapsed.
What's new tab
Introducing the what's new tab! We'll keep this updated as new functionality and improvements are made going forward.
June 2019
Sort by who added
If your retrospective is set to "Show who added ideas", you can now sort the ideas by who added - ideal if you'd like your team to talk through each idea before grouping, voting or adding actions.
UI tweaks and improvements
- Carousels: drag hysteresis thresholds - it's now easier to flick back and forth between actions and ideas (particularly on mobile devices)
- Carousels: pagination - now easier to see where you are in the collection; and quickly jump around between actions and ideas
- Dialogs: pressing ESC will cancel and close the current dialog
May 2019
Bug fixes and improvements
- Participants can no longer override presentation mode using tab or arrow keys
- Countdown timer expiry is more dramatic and visible