Using apps to record the output of agile sessions

As a Scrum Master, one of the benefits I find in using agile to manage software development projects is that people can get away from the desks and screens to use physical boards, marker pens and post-it notes when drawing up a technical problem or running ABCs, retrospectives etc. The problem is, how do you capture the output? Unless you do that, there’s little point to having spent the time in the meeting.

Some will photograph the wall or chart and email themselves the pictures, while others will manually write down the follow up points or write the contents of the post-it notes into a wiki page.

With this in mind, recently I noticed there was a Post-It Plus app on the iOS App Store that allows you to take a photo of the wall and it will digitise the post-its for you. We used it in a recent release retrospective and it allowed us to capture the output in various formats.

Evernote does something similar and is available on Android and iOS, except that it also has the ability to recognise the text that was written – which could be even more useful. The drawback to Evernote’s implementation is that it seems to capture only one post-it note at a time…

After our next retrospective I’m going to try both apps again and see which is more useful.

I thought I’d pass this on in case anyone has experiences of these apps or would like to try them for themselves.