Retrospectives are supposed to helps teams determine the successes and negative aspects in the project / team to achieve continuous improvement. Success depends on many factors. Starting with a certain fun and entertainment factor, the chosen type of retrospective must of course also provide sufficient insights into the past (e.g. the last sprint), so it is possible to recognize what went well and what badly. A significant prerequisite for a successful retrospective is sufficient acceptance in the team for the chosen approach. We started a few years ago to use the Team Radar in projects in its "analogue" form and are very satisfied with the results we achieved.

Using the Team Radar, we can visualize the assessments of all team members concerning various categories in a spider web graph. It provides a very good method for visualizing in which points the team agrees and which it does not. The spider web serves both as a basis to discuss areas that were not evaluated highly by the team and thus offer potential for improvement, as well as for emphasizing things that went well or that improved over time.

But in this form of retrospective there were also negative points in our projects that led to criticism of this technique, in particular in larger teams. For instance, it requires relatively a high preparation and follow-up time and the coordination process for teams with 8 or more members is relatively long. In the past this resulted in most of the time planned for the retrospective being spent on organizational matters. Therefore, we developed the "Team Radar for Confluence" plugin, basically the digitalized version of the familiar Team Radar.