Retrospective · Starfish retro · Agile
How to run a starfish retrospective, with a worked example
By T. Krause
A starfish retro gives a settled team five places to put a note, so a habit can be turned up or down instead of only kept or dropped. Here is a 50-minute agenda, followed through one made-up sprint from 22 notes to two actions.
To run a starfish retrospective, set up five areas called Keep doing, More of, Less of, Stop doing and Start doing. Give the team eight minutes to write notes in silence, group the notes into themes across the areas, and finish with two actions that each have an owner. It takes about 50 minutes with five to eight people.
The format is for teams whose problems have become matters of degree. The standup can stay, and it can lose ten minutes. Patrick Kua wrote it up on his blog in March 2006. He liked that it lets people reflect on "varying degrees of things" and doesn't force everything into "What Went Well" or "Not So Well".
We make Prompt Board, and our starfish retrospective template has the five areas plus a sixth frame for actions. Its sample board belongs to the made-up platform team you'll meet further down, so you can compare this guide with the board note by note. You can run the same meeting with a marker and a wall.
The question each area asks
People write better notes when each area has a question behind it. These are the ones we'd read out at the start, with a note from the sample board as an example of each.
| Area | Question | Example note |
|---|---|---|
| Keep doing | What would you miss if it went away? | Pairing on risky changes |
| More of | What helps, and happens too rarely? | Writing the test before the fix |
| Less of | What still has a place but takes too much of it? | Standups over 15 minutes |
| Stop doing | What could we drop tomorrow and lose nothing? | Merging on Friday afternoon |
| Start doing | What haven't we tried yet? | Rotating on-call notes |
The first question comes from Kua, who suggests asking what people would miss if a practice, tool or role disappeared.
Two pairs of areas get mixed up, and one test settles each.
Keep doing or More of? Ask whether you'd be happy if it stayed exactly as it is. If yes, it's Keep doing. If you want it to happen more often, it's More of.
Less of or Stop doing? Ask whether it still does some good. Kua's example of Less of is a standup that has turned into a status meeting. Nobody wants to cancel the standup, so it doesn't belong in Stop doing. A note that survives neither test can stay where its author put it, because the grouping step comes next and looks across the areas anyway.
A 50-minute agenda
| Minutes | Step |
|---|---|
| 5 | Read out the actions from the last retro |
| 3 | Explain the questions, especially More of and Less of |
| 8 | Write in silence, one habit per note |
| 12 | Read the notes out and group them into themes |
| 15 | Vote on themes and talk through the top two |
| 7 | Choose two adjustments and write them in Actions |
The eight minutes of silence matter most, because they give the quiet people the same head start as the loud ones. Prompt Board has no shared timer or voting tool yet, so keep a phone timer beside you and have people vote by adding their initials to a theme's title.
The reading and grouping step gets twelve minutes because every note gets read aloud. With a team of eight, take the extra time from the discussion, not from the writing.
Sprint 31: one team through the agenda
Everything in this example is invented: the team, the people and the numbers. It's a platform team of five on two-week sprints, and they've run retros together for about a year.
The last retro's actions
Two actions came out of sprint 30. One was finished. The other, a runbook for the billing service, had no name on it and nobody had touched it. The facilitator asks whether anyone wants it. Nobody does, so it's dropped.
Silent writing
After eight minutes the board holds 22 notes: four in Keep doing, five in More of, six in Less of, three in Stop doing and four in Start doing. Less of is the fullest area, which fits a team this settled. The sample board in the template keeps two notes from each area so it stays readable.
Grouping across the areas
Grouping shows what the five areas hide. The team assigns each note to a theme, leaves it where its author put it, and counts the four themes against the areas.
| Theme | Keep doing | More of | Less of | Stop doing | Start doing | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reviews and rework | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 8 |
| Releases | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 6 |
| Meetings | 1 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| Everything else | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Total | 4 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 22 |
Read along the rows. Reviews and rework is the biggest theme, but seven of its eight notes sit in Keep doing and More of, such as "Pairing on risky changes" and "Writing the test before the fix". Only "Rework after late reviews" complains. So the largest group is mostly good news.
Releases is the opposite. "Merging on Friday afternoon" and "Skipping the changelog" are both in Stop doing, and five of its six notes want something reduced or dropped. Meetings looks similar on a smaller scale, with "Standups over 15 minutes" among three notes in Less of, while "Friday demo" sits in Keep doing as the one meeting nobody wants to change.
A count of notes per theme would have sent this team to the wrong discussion. Each person gets two votes, which makes ten. Releases takes five, Meetings three and Reviews and rework two.
Two adjustments
The team allows itself one habit to turn up or down and one to start or stop. Two is few on purpose. The team would rather finish two than carry seven forward.
- Turn down. Standups over 15 minutes, with the action "Ana: standup timer from Monday".
- Stop. Skipping the changelog, with the action "Lars: changelog check in CI".
Merging on Friday afternoon stays on the board. A changelog check can't count those, so Lars agrees to list the sprint's merge times from the repository's history, and the team will look again next sprint.
Sprint 32
At the next retro, Ana reports that the standup finished inside 15 minutes on eight of the sprint's ten working days. Lars's check stopped two merges with no changelog entry. Both actions come off the list, and "Standups over 15 minutes" doesn't reappear in Less of. That's the sign an adjustment worked. Lars's list shows one merge on a Friday afternoon, so that note stays on the board for another round.
When to run something else
Starfish suits a team with habits to adjust, and some situations call for a different board.
A new team has few settled habits to adjust, so More of and Less of give it little to do. Start with start, stop, continue, which asks for the same kinds of notes with fewer choices.
If the next few weeks worry the team more than the last two, try the sailboat retrospective, which has a place for risks ahead. Our guide to six retrospective formats compares these and three others side by side.
If the team is spread across cities, the agenda above still works. Our guide to the remote retrospective covers what changes on a shared board, such as how to keep time and how to stop two people doing all the talking.
Frequently asked questions
What is a starfish retrospective?
A team retrospective with five areas: Keep doing, More of, Less of, Stop doing and Start doing. The name fits its diagram, a star with five points. The two middle settings let a team turn a habit up or down without having to keep it or drop it.
Who created the starfish retrospective?
The format is widely credited to Patrick Kua, who described it on his blog in March 2006. His post explains how he used the diagram and doesn't claim to have invented it, so we'd say he made it known.
How long does a starfish retro take?
Plan for 45 to 60 minutes with five to eight people. The agenda in this guide uses 50. A 30-minute slot tends to run out before anyone has chosen an action.
What is the difference between starfish and start, stop, continue?
Start, stop, continue has three areas. Starfish keeps those three, with Continue renamed Keep doing, and adds More of and Less of. Use start, stop, continue when the team mostly needs to make clear decisions, and starfish when its notes keep coming out as "a bit more" or "a bit less".
Run your next retro on a starfish
Book 50 minutes and open the starfish retrospective template. Clear the platform team's notes, read the five questions aloud, and start the eight minutes. Before anyone leaves, check that both actions have a name on them.