🚀 Building a Rovo Agent to Supercharge Agile Retrospectives

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Hi Everyone!

As part of the Rovo Agent Challenge, I wanted to share something a little different — a Rovo agent that helps teams run smarter Agile Retrospectives.

We all know retrospectives are essential for continuous improvement. Yet, too often, teams walk into a retro with little data — relying on memory or scattered reports. I used to spend hours manually gathering metrics, which made retros slow and less effective. That’s where my "Retrospective Helper Agent 🔄" comes in. It transforms your retro preparation from tedious to effortless, giving your team clear, actionable insights.

What does this Rovo Agent do?

This agent pulls together key insights from your Jira projects and prepares them before your retro session. No more flipping through dashboards or digging into reports — everything is summarized automatically.

Here’s what it provides:

📊 Issue Summary → What got completed, carried over, or is still in progress.
🐞 Bug Trends → New, closed, or reopened defects.
⏳ Cycle Time Insights → Are stories taking longer than expected?
🚩 Blockers → Which tickets got stuck, and why.
🙌 Highlights → Celebrate completed epics or key milestones.

All of this is presented in a clean, AI-powered summary inside Confluence or Jira.

How to Create the Retrospective Helper Agent

You don’t need coding skills — just Studio. Here’s the step-by-step guide:

1️⃣ Open Studio

Go to Confluence or Jira → Open Studio → Click Create Agent.

2️⃣ Name Your Agent

Example: “Retrospective Helper Agent 🔄”
Add a description like: “Summarizes sprint outcomes and suggests retro discussion points.”

3️⃣ Add Agent Instructions

This is the heart of your setup. Use the instructions below as a guide, and feel free to adjust them to suit your team’s specific needs.

Agent Instructions (copy/paste ready):

At the end of each sprint, for the current sprint only: 1. Summarize the number of issues completed, carried over, and in-progress. 2. Highlight bug trends (new bugs, closed bugs, reopened bugs). 3. Share cycle time insights – note if stories took longer than average. 4. List major blockers, why they were stuck, and any dependencies. 5. Call out any highlights or wins (epics closed, milestones reached). 6. Suggest 3–5 discussion questions for the retrospective. 7. Present the output in a clear, bullet-point summary with emojis for Highlights, Blockers, and Bugs.

4️⃣ Add Conversational Starters

These are the discussion points your agent will automatically generate based on your instructions. 
“What discussion points should we consider for the retro?”
“Can you summarize our completed issues?”
“What were our sprint highlights this time?”
These prompts help guide the team’s conversation during the retrospective.

5️⃣ Add Knowledge

Add the knowledge base for your organization or customize the Jira projects the agent should access. This ensures the agent has the right context and data to generate accurate and relevant summaries.

6️⃣ Add Actions

Configure the agent to save its response directly into a Confluence space or page for future reference. This way, your team sees insights exactly where retrospectives happen, making them easy to access and act upon.

7️⃣ Test It

Run the agent at the end of your sprint and review the summary it generates. Adjust the instructions if you want the output to be shorter, longer, or more detailed, and confirm that the conversational starters, metrics, and highlights are appearing as expected.

🎬 Watch the Agent in Action: For a quick visual walkthrough of how to create and use the Retrospective Helper Agent, check out this video: Watch here. It shows the setup, instructions, and example output in real time.

Suggested Retro Questions:

• How can we prevent reopened bugs next sprint?

• What slowed down story cycle times?

• How can we reduce dependency blockers?

Why Use the Retrospective Helper Agent?

The agent removes the guesswork from retrospectives. Instead of relying on memory or manual reports, your team gets:

• Time savings: No more digging through Jira or Confluence.

• Fact-based retrospectives: Discussions are grounded in actual metrics.

• Actionable insights: Blockers, bottlenecks, and wins are highlighted automatically.

• Consistency: Every sprint gets a structured summary — nothing is overlooked.

This ensures retros are focused, data-driven, and productive, helping your team continuously improve.

Tips for Maximizing the Agent’s Value

• Customize the questions: Tailor the discussion points to your team’s current challenges.

• Review before the retro: Use the summary as a conversation starter, not the final verdict.

• Iterate instructions: As your team evolves, update the agent to capture new metrics or focus areas.

Final Thoughts

I still remember my team first sprint using this agent — walking into the retro with every metric, blocker, and highlight at our fingertips completely transformed the discussion.

Agile retrospectives are a powerful tool for team growth — but only if you have the right data at hand. With the Retrospective Helper Agent, teams spend less time preparing and more time reflecting, collaborating, and planning improvements.

Build your first Retrospective Helper Agent this sprint and see how Rovo Agents can transform your retrospectives — then share your results with the community!

[Kelly Stocker]

Love this @Sanam Malleswari