Continuous improvement
The ongoing practice of incrementally improving a team's process, tools, and collaboration, most explicitly enacted through the Sprint Retrospective.
What it means
Continuous improvement is a broader Agile and lean principle, not a single Scrum artifact, but Scrum operationalizes it directly through the Sprint Retrospective, which happens at the end of every Sprint without exception.
Effective continuous improvement focuses on a small number of high-impact changes at a time rather than a long list of good intentions that never get implemented.
Common mistakes
Some teams add the most important Retrospective action item directly to the next Sprint Backlog, ensuring it is not lost among regular feature work.
Example
After several Retrospectives flagged flaky tests, the team dedicates capacity each Sprint until the test suite is reliable again.