Last week I wrote about impediments, and making sure you go through them every day at the daily scrum standup. As I was discussing blockers with my team over the past week I noticed (again) that most of these impediments are recurring… they seem to crop up nearly every sprint.

Scrum teaches us about the impediments log, which you keep during a sprint to track the burndown of impediments. Even more interesting, I think, is to track a history of your impediments over time. Which ones turn up often? Which ones seem to cause the most interruption/downtime? What common themes are there?

This information becomes perfect input for retrospectives or general continuous improvement, and you can easily see the issues that are the most problematic or recurrent, and tackle them first.