Skrüm: an open-source home for retrospectives, planning poker and team sessions

Arnaud Ritti — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:03:12 +0000

A retrospective can end with useful ideas and a list of actions. The next question is who will pick them up, when, and where the team will find them again.

🛠️ I’m building Skrüm, a self-hostable app for running team sessions and keeping their follow-up visible. It brings together retrospectives, planning poker, whiteboards, surveys and eight icebreaker games. This is a walkthrough of the product, followed by the technical details for developers who want to run it or contribute.

Start with the team dashboard

The dashboard shows recent sessions, actions that need attention and team survey results. Workspaces contain teams, and each team has its own sessions and actions.

To start, create a session, give it a name and choose its format. Share the session link with participants; guests can join through a link too.

Choose a retrospective format

There are 52 built-in retrospective templates, including Start, Stop, Continue, the 4Ls, Sailboat and Mad/Sad/Glad. You can also create your own templates. The choice gives the conversation a structure: observations about the sprint, how the team feels, an analysis of a problem or ideas for improvement.

A retrospective moves through writing cards, grouping related topics, voting, discussion and actions. Participants can write before cards are revealed, and anonymous cards are supported.

Actions can have an owner, a due date and reminders. They remain available after the retrospective on the team’s action page. That gives the team somewhere to check decisions between sessions.

Use the other formats when they fit

🃏 Planning poker lets the team compare estimates, reveal cards and discuss differences. It supports custom decks and importing tasks from an issue tracker.

Whiteboards provide a shared canvas for notes and diagrams. They can be used to map a workflow, explore an idea or organise a discussion.

Surveys cover team pulse, health checks, eNPS and custom questions. They provide another way to collect input and review results.

🎲 The eight icebreakers are Draw & Guess, Sprint in one GIF, Hangman, Decoded, Two truths and a lie, Mood weather, Guess who? and Quick question. You can choose a drawing game, a word game or a check-in depending on the group. Decoded uses emoji clues to guess a word. The GIF game requires a configured GIPHY or Tenor provider.

Configured integrations with Jira, Linear and GitHub let you export actions, sync their statuses and write planning poker estimates back to the source, subject to the integration’s settings and supported fields. In-app and email notifications cover action reminders and retrospective recaps, according to your preferences. Session links and retrospective recaps can also be shared through connected Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost and Telegram integrations.

What’s underneath

Skrüm uses Laravel, Inertia React and Laravel Reverb for realtime collaboration. Background jobs handle work such as action reminders. Authentication supports passwords, passkeys, two-factor authentication and SSO.

Integrations include Jira, Linear, GitHub and several chat tools. There is also a Model Context Protocol server: an assistant can access the operations its token permits.

📦 For self-hosting, the Docker image includes the web server, websockets, queue and scheduler. PostgreSQL is the default Compose database; MariaDB, MySQL and SQLite are also supported. The repository documents installation, backups and upgrades, so use its current instructions for your deployment.

The interface is available in English, French, Spanish and German. The code is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later.

Try it with a real session

I’m the author, and I’m looking for teams willing to try Skrüm during a retrospective or refinement. I’d like feedback on preparing sessions, including guests, moving through the phases and following up afterwards. Developer feedback on installation and the code is welcome too.

🌐 Explore Skrüm and its features : https://arnaud-ritti.github.io/skrum/