Why RetroBox does not have a “grouping feedback items” feature

If you have a lot of feedback items to discuss in a retrospective, you will probably use some sort of voting process to decide which feedback items to spend more time on. Some teams create groups of feedback items before they start voting, in order to aggregate votes on similar feedback items. We find that this is usually more cumbersome and time-consuming than it’s worth. It triggers discussions of what group should have which feedback, what groups we should create, what they mean and so on. It is hard. We consciously decided to not support “formal grouping” and take a more relaxed approach: we just let people vote on feedback items. The ones that don’t get any votes don’t get discussed anyway, so we have a clearer list of items before we waste time grouping them. With those items that have no votes out of the way, we find it easy to group voted feedback items just by looking at them. The retro facilitator does this roughly. Between “spending time on perfect grouping” and “spending more time on discussing the issues” we prefer the latter.