Retrospectives - It's Good To Be Choosy - Mike Cohn

I’ve learned not to go to the market when I’m hungry. If I do, I buy too much. When I’m hungry, everything looks too tasty, and I buy more than I can possibly eat.
Agile teams often behave similarly in retrospectives, especially when beginning their agile journey. During a retrospective, team members identify so many promising opportunities for improvement that they decide to tackle every one of them.
These teams would be far better off improving at one, two, or maybe three ways of working. If team members attempt to improve at more than that, their efforts will be too diffused.
Improvement Is Continual
My favorite way to facilitate a retrospective is to use a Stop, Start, Continue exercise. This puts improvement ideas into each of those categories.
To help teams keep to a three-improvement limit, I coach them to pick only one or two new improvements in each retrospective. That leaves them one or two items to select from their continue list.
A continue list contains behaviors at which the team has made improvements but which aren’t yet habits, like writing better unit tests or overlapping work. (Once a behavior has become ingrained, teams should remove it from their continue list so that the list remains a manageable size.)
However you choose to run your retrospective, be sure to take away just one to three concrete improvements that you can track as part of the next sprint. It’s one of the best ways I know to succeed with agile.

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