Many Agile practitioners are searching for the keywords “retrospective keep doing stop doing”, searching for the specific retrospective questions. Well, I can help you with that.
Retrospective Keep Doing Stop Doing
The three questions to ask
When searching for “retrospective keep doing stop doing”, you are looking for the so called “Keep Stop Start” or “Start Stop Continue” retrospective. As a Scrum Master and Psychologist, I personally prefer the “Keep Stop Start” retrospective (more on that below). You are asking the development team the following questions:
- Keep: [Optional: Looking at the last sprint…] What should we keep doing?
- Stop: What should we stop doing?
- Start: What should we start doing?
As mentioned, if you want to give the team more context (i.e., by saying “looking at the last sprint or weeks”) when asking these questions.
By the way, you can do this retrospective online using our retrospective tool Echometer now (no registration necessary):
The order of questions - Retrospective Keep Doing Stop Doing
As I mentioned, I prefer the “Keep Stop Start” retrospective compared to the “Start Stop Continue” retrospective. Why? Because of the order of the questions. Specifically, I believe the last question counts.
By asking what you want to “Start” as a last question, you perfectly transition to the last phase of the retrospective - potential action items. Only asking what you want to “continue” does not have this nice side effect.
By the way, here you can find 7 tips for great action items in retrospectives.
Conclusion – Retrospective Keep Doing Stop Doing
The “Keep Stop Start” retrospective is one of the most common retrospective ideas. I highly recommend to surprise your team regularly with a different set of retrospective questions. We wrote a blog post with 32 kickass retrospective ideas for beginners and professionals. - feel free to have a look!
