Stop Using “Start,” “Stop,” “Continue”
Using the same old retrospective format is holding your team back.
It’s the same old song and dance. At the end of the sprint, everyone gathers together, mulls over their sprint, and then puts their thoughts into a document with three headers: “Start,” “Stop,” and “Continue.” After the team reviews all their feedback, they pick a few things as action items and the cycle repeats.
Most of these teams say they’re content with their retrospectives. “Everybody contributes, and we always come up with something to improve,” they’ll say. And I’m not saying that isn’t true! But in the spirit of helping your team become the best they can be, you’re not doing anyone a favor by keeping things vanilla. Why? Because changing up your retrospective format will make your team think creatively about your sprint. This will, in turn, bring forward different kinds of feedback.
“Well sometimes we use a different format!” you say. “We did one that had traffic lights. Green meant ‘start’ or ‘continue,’ and red meant ‘stop.’” Most of the retrospective formats you’ll find with a quick Google search are simply cute themes layered on top of the basic “Start, Stop, Continue” format. You’ll have to dig! And in upcoming blog posts, I’ll outline some useful formats that can help you and your team reflect productively on your sprints.
The first step in choosing a good retrospective format is to reflect on your sprint before the retrospective. It doesn’t have to be long — even a few minutes will suffice. How was your sprint? Was it productive, or were there distractions? Was there a story that seemed to drag on forever, or did you overestimate the story’s effort? Did the team work well together, or was there conflict? Once you’ve mulled it over, you can then match your sprint to an effective retrospective format.
Picture a well-performing team that has a clear backlog and is in pure execution mode. After three sprints focused solely on executing, their “Start, Stop, Continue” retrospectives are starting to generate less and less feedback. The Scrum Master thinks, “This is great! We’re getting stories over the line rapidly and the team is executing efficiently. Nobody has much they think we need to improve or change!” And the team agrees.
This happens all the time. And once again, the team is not wrong! They are doing well and don’t feel like there’s anything that they really need to change. But we should always challenge ourselves to be better, faster, more efficient, and more successful. At this point, it becomes clearer that the “Start, Stop, Continue” retrospective format isn’t helping us as much anymore. Why? Because this retrospective format causes us to focus on things that are problematic. Once our team performs well, there won’t be too many things that are problems. We have to think harder, or, at least, differently.
In this case, a retrospective format that can help bring out more and different feedback is “Went Well, Went OK, Didn’t Go Well.” It’s exactly what it sounds like. And honestly, it sounds a lot like “Start, Stop, Continue”! But what differentiates it is that it calls attention to a gray section — “Went OK.” What you almost never see in a “Start, Stop, Continue” retrospective are things that are only OK. You see problems and successes — not what’s in the middle. And when your team is performing well, the big problems are already gone. What’s left to improve, then, are things that aren’t problems but are just “OK.”
Using a format that gives teammates space to surface smaller annoyances is very effective for a high-performing team. Likewise, if you have a team with solid processes, you would use a format that focuses on outcomes and artifacts instead of “start” or “stop.” Verbs make us think of how we do things (writing the code, testing, getting approvals) instead of relevant physical artifacts (our slow testing servers, the noisy office, the end product we developed). Both are important.
It’s important to try different retrospective formats so that you can get different kinds of feedback. Using the same format sprint over sprint means you’ll get similar output sprint over sprint. Your scrum team will think about the same kinds of things, so certain areas of opportunity will always be overlooked. So stay tuned to learn about different formats that will work best for your team on their journey to become the best they can be!
Edit: Here is a list of retrospective-related articles I have subsequently published.
