Writing good sprint goals
Writing good sprint goals
Disclaimer: The content in this article is a mix from the references linked below and my personal experience. It is not meant to be an absolute truth. Just what it worked for the squads I worked on. It is obviously biased given our circumstances. Looking forward to reading your comments about what worked for you and if something here feels off!
Sprint goals
A sprint goal describes the purpose of a sprint. It provides a shared objective, and states why it’s worthwhile undertaking the sprint. Sample sprint goals are “Learn about the right user interaction for the registration feature” and “Make the reporting feature available to the users”. As a rule of thumb, teams should work with one shared goal. This ensures that everyone moves in the same direction.
The Sprint Goal helps provide focus on an objective we want to achieve and allows the flexibility to negotiate the work to achieve that objective.
Sprint goal benefits
- Supports Prioritisation. A shared sprint goal facilitates prioritisation: It makes it easier to determine which stories should be worked on in the next cycle.
- Creates Focus and Facilitates Teamwork. Sprint goals create focus, facilitate teamwork, and provide the basis for an effective sprint planning session. Teams don’t commit to individual stories in Scrum; they commit to the sprint goal.
- Helps Obtain Relevant Feedback. If the goal is to evaluate the user experience, user representatives should therefore attend the sprint review meeting. But if the goal is to reduce technical risk by evaluating different object-relational mapping tools, then it is probably more appropriate to invite an experienced developer or architect from another team to discuss the solution.
- Makes it Easier to Analyse the Feedback. Working with a sprint goal helps analyse the feedback obtained. If the team works on several unrelated stories in the same sprint then it can be tricky to relate the feedback to the right user story
- Supports Stakeholder Communication. Using a sprint goal helps you communicate the objective of the sprint to stakeholders. This allows them to understand what the sprint is about and to decide if they should attend the next sprint review meeting.
Most common problems when creating sprint goals
- The sprint goal is too big or you have too many. That causes losing focus.
- The sprint goal is vague. This happens when the team finds it hard to reach an agreement on whether or not they have achieved a Sprint goal. Tips to solve this:
✓ Make the sprint goal measurable.
✓ During sprint planning ask: “How will we know if we have achieved the sprint goal” - Not paying attention to the sprint goal during the sprint. Tips:
✓ Make it visible.
✓ Talk about it in stand-ups. - The sprint goal doesn’t feel meaningful. A sprint goal is supposed to provide purpose. People want to do meaningful work. Tips:
✓ Make it business or user focused whenever possible.
✓ Make it focused on testing business assumptions and getting feedback.
✓ Make it focused on reducing risk.
Writing great sprint goals
Like any operational goal, a sprint goal should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. As sprints are time-boxed iterations, every sprint goal is naturally time-bound: It has to be reached by the end of the sprint.
A sample goal of an early sprint is to learn more about the desired user experience (a desirability aspect), the software architecture (feasibility), or the pricing model (viability). To pick the right goal, choose the risk that is likely to hurt you most if it is not addressed immediately.
Employing a specific and measurable sprint goal allows you to determine success. For instance, don’t just state “Create a prototype” as your sprint goal. Be explicit about the type and its purpose. Say instead: “Create a paper prototype of the user registration feature to test our user interaction ideas.”
The default mechanism in Scrum to determine success is to analyse the stakeholder feedback. Scrum suggests that the feedback should be obtained in the sprint review meeting by presenting the product increment.
How to choose a good sprint goal?
This template is a good artefact to help the team to stay focused on what aspects makes a sprint goal a good one. The idea is to fill in all the fields in that template.
