Sprint goals are the heartbeat of the sprint where issues are turned into increment.
It’s a shared goal created by the scrum team to achieve a single objective suggested by the product owner.
What is a sprint goal?
The sprint goal is one or two lines sentence on the target the product owner would like to achieve during the sprint. It’s a single objective for the exact amount of work needed to be accomplished by the end of the sprint.
- Ideally, every sprint should have a goal because it keeps everyone on the same page.
- It’s the desired outcome that shows the shared goal of the scrum team.
- The sprint goal should be measurable and specific in order to keep the focus on issues.
- The sprint goal is decided during the sprint planning phase and added into the sprint backlog.
- The sprint goal is created by the scrum team so they can show their commitment to achieving increment.
Sprint goal helps to get coherence and focus while encouraging the scrum teams to work with integrity rather than on separate initiatives.
After the work begins, if anything turns out to be different than expected, then the developers connect with the product owner to settle the scope of the sprint backlog within the sprint without altering the sprint goal.
How sprint goals will help you as a team?
- Stay focused
- Determine what is urgent and valuable
- Identify priorities
- Observe progress
Who sets sprint goals?
The product owner is the part of the scrum team and plays a significant role to determine the project scope and track the performance. You might think that the product owner forms the sprint goal.
But, this is not the case.
During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner suggests objectives and orders product backlog items to the team to set the objective. His suggested objective is not the same as the sprint goal.
Who comes next in your mind who you think can create the sprint goal?
The scrum master!
The scrum master is the servant leader who helps to organize the team but doesn’t determine the sprint goal.
The development team determines how to accomplish increment but does not determine the sprint goal on their own.
The sprint goal is created during the sprint planning by scrum team, product owner, scrum master and development teams altogether.
The important steps to create a sprint goal.
The sprint goal is defined during the sprint planning meeting. Here are a few important steps that lead us to create a good sprint goal.
- Product owner suggests objectives with the help of product backlog items.
- The development team discusses and understands the tasks of the sprint.
- The scrum team mutually narrow downs the items to be done.
- The scrum team determines the sprint goal for the sprint.
Here are a few real sprint goal examples
Let’s suppose you need to build an eCommerce website.
Before the work begins, you need to create an outline or a story map that involves several online webstore development steps.
For the very first step, you need to focus on creating a website as simple as possible so it would be easy to define a product catalogue with customized specifications.
Create a dashboard to integrate widgets with various products.
The third phase is important because you can focus on the expansion of webshop to support purchase licenses and large customer communities.
Once you have prepared the story map, now you are ready to create your first sprint and sprint goal.
To create your first sprint, you need to conduct a sprint planning meeting with the product owner, scrum master, development team and scrum teams.
They will discuss the stories, issues, or tasks to be completed under your first sprint. You can plan a single sprint at a time or multiple sprints for the future as well.
Once the issues are added, now you are ready to name your sprint and define its goal.
Creating sprint goals:
The goal for webshop development sprint 1: “Establish deployment pipeline and release an empty site to production”
The goal for webshop development sprint 2: “Get top-selling products on the homepage”
The goal for webshop development sprint 3: “A visitor should be able to order the product”
The goal for webshop development sprint 4: “Extend product catalogue for more products”
Why is a sprint goal important?
Sprint goal efficiently helps in staying at the right track throughout the sprint, set the priorities and makes it clear what stories should be worked on in the next sprint.
It efficiently serves the role of test assumption and addresses risks involved in delivering features.
It provides guidance to teams to produce product increments.
It integrates the team together to accomplish the shared goal as it offers flexibility regarding the functionality implemented within the sprint.
The product owner can efficiently create a product roadmap.
It removes clutter and brings cohesion in product backlog when planning a release.
It offers invisibility to stakeholder management and helps them make better decisions.
How to add sprint goals in Jira?
Before creating a sprint, you need to plan the sprint in the sprint planning to determine the stories that need to be pulled from the top of the backlog.
The sprints are the fixed length events of 15 days to a month. Sprints are the short project development phase. A new sprint starts right immediately after the previous sprint ends.
The process of sprint planning meeting involves creating a sprint, assigning stories to the sprint, and starting the sprint.
Creating a sprint in Jira:
In Jira, you can make a single sprint for your current iteration or plan ahead for multiple future sprints and several iterations.
To create a sprint, you need to go to the Backlog of your scrum project and click to create a sprint at the top of the backlog.
Once the sprint is created, you can start adding issues in the backlog.
How to add issues to a sprint?
While planning a sprint, you need to know your teams’ capacity for work and the amount of work they can commit to. Velocity chart and burndown chart can help you estimate work and add issues into the sprint.
After defining, estimating and adding issues into the backlog, now you can start the sprint.
Before starting the sprint, you can define the name of the sprint and define the sprint goal in one line note. The sprint goal will be visible in the sprint report and burndown chart of that sprint.
Once the sprint is active, you can add and remove issues but it affects project scope and appears in the burndown chart.
What are the challenges in creating a good sprint goal?
When the sprint goal is too big
There are several reasons for the sprint goals to become too big when you are working on multiple, unrelated, and undefined projects.
When the sprint goal is unrealistic
It happens when you are trying to accomplish more than your teams’ capability to work or less in time that is not enough to complete the goal.
The sprint goal is vague
- It happens when you don’t know what you are trying to achieve in the sprint.
- The people in the sprint planning meeting are not on the same page to understand the commitment.
- The sprint goal that is immeasurable.
How to create a good sprint goal?
A good sprint goal will help you achieve the increment while it brings transparency and visibility that helps you take better decisions.
In order to plan a good sprint goal, you need to plan and estimate accurately. For the right estimation, you need the velocity charts and burndown charts to have a clear view of your teamwork capability.
Make sure your team is on the same page so they can show their commitment to the goals.
Make the sprint goals visible and highlighted to the team.
In daily scrum, ask teams about the progress of sprint goals and guide them in resolving roadblocks.
How Khoji for Agile can help you accomplish the sprint goal?
It’s beyond the shadow of a doubt that sprint is the heartbeat of the scrum and sprint goal plays a vital part in making the short iterative cycles of agile project development useful. Without sprints’ goals, the teams can easily divert from their tracks.
Khoji for Agile helps scrum teams to achieve their goals, increment, and get the definition of done achieved effortlessly.
The right planning and estimation is a crucial part that decides the fate of the project. C-suite teams often struggle to have accuracy in their estimations because of lack of transparency and visibility.
Khoji for agile will help you achieve your sprint goals and product goals that involve less effort, less time and less cost.
It predicts problems before they take place, helps you keep the right track and make better decisions.
Why Khoji for Agile?
Khoji for Agile is a game-changing agile project management tool that brings transparency, efficiency, and agility to your projects.
Khoji helps you stay focused and move ahead in the fast-moving digital economy by aligning your business operations with outcomes in real-time.
- It connects all teams with strategic goals and objectives.
- The transparent workflows connect information from the team level all the way through to the executive teams.
- Tracking roadmaps, bottlenecks, risks, and dependencies at a feature level.
- To deliver more value to the customer, it brings customer value and strategic investment together for fast product release.
