Ask a group of agile practitioners which retrospective format is best and you'll get a split room. Start/Stop/Continue advocates point to its directness — every card is implicitly an action. Mad/Sad/Glad advocates point to its emotional depth — it surfaces what SSC can't. Both groups are right, which is why the framing of the question is wrong.
The question isn't which format is better. The question is which format is better for this team, at this moment, in this sprint. Getting that right is what separates retrospectives that change things from retrospectives that feel like going through the motions.
What Start / Stop / Continue Is Actually Good At
SSC is a decision-making framework disguised as a retrospective format. Every card that gets written is, implicitly, a recommendation: we should start doing this, we should stop doing that, we should keep doing the other thing. This makes SSC extremely efficient for teams that need to make concrete process changes and don't want to spend a lot of time on analysis.
The format also generates buy-in for the changes it produces. When team members propose changes (rather than having a facilitator impose them), they're more likely to follow through. SSC, more than any other format, produces action items that the team actually owns.
Where SSC falls short: it has no mechanism for surfacing emotional context. A team that is demoralised, frustrated, or quietly disengaging will produce SSC cards that look fine on the surface — "we should improve our code review turnaround" — without the underlying emotional truth: "we feel like nothing we say in retrospectives ever actually changes, so we've stopped trying." SSC won't surface that.
What Mad / Sad / Glad Is Actually Good At
Mad/Sad/Glad works by legitimising emotional expression. The column labels give people permission to say how work is actually feeling, not just what happened. "I felt undermined when the scope changed without the team being consulted" is a Mad card that would never appear in an SSC session — it's not a Start or a Stop, it's a feeling that needs to be acknowledged before it can be addressed.
This makes Mad/Sad/Glad uniquely valuable for teams experiencing:
- A difficult sprint — production incident, deadline pressure, team conflict
- Growing frustration that hasn't been explicitly named
- A change in team dynamics — new members, new manager, reorg
- Low morale that's showing up indirectly in velocity or quality metrics
The limitation of Mad/Sad/Glad is that it doesn't naturally produce action items. The cards describe how people feel, not what should change. A skilled facilitator can bridge this — "given that three people felt this way about X, what's one thing we could do differently next sprint?" — but it requires more active facilitation than SSC.
The Pattern That Emerges Over Time
Teams that rotate between SSC and Mad/Sad/Glad (and other formats) over time tend to find that the two serve complementary needs. When the team is functioning well and needs process improvement, SSC is efficient and produces good action items. When there's an emotional undercurrent, Mad/Sad/Glad surfaces it before it becomes a bigger problem.
A good heuristic: if three or more people seem disengaged or frustrated, run Mad/Sad/Glad. If the team is energised and the problem is process, run SSC. If you're not sure, run Mad/Sad/Glad — you'll find out quickly whether there's something emotional to address.
Both Are Available in ScrumTool
ScrumTool has both formats (plus 4Ls, DAKI, Sailboat, and custom templates) built into the template selector. You pick the format when creating the board — it takes five seconds, and the columns are configured automatically. There's no friction in switching formats between sprints, which is exactly the right default.
The AI summary generated at board close also adapts to the format — it reads the emotional content of Mad/Sad/Glad cards and the action-oriented content of SSC cards, and reflects both in the themes and sentiment analysis. That persistence across formats is part of why rotating regularly is worth doing.
The Verdict
Neither format wins. Start with Mad/Sad/Glad if you haven't done it in a while — emotional context is almost always worth surfacing. Use SSC when the team is ready to focus on process changes. Rotate. The teams that never change their retro format are the teams that eventually stop getting anything from their retros.
Start your next retro free at ScrumTool.