To Sprint Goal Or Not To Sprint Goal? Understanding The Debate
Defining the Sprint Goal: The Core Purpose and Focus
The sprint goal refers to the overarching objective that an agile development team aims to achieve within a given sprint duration. It represents the key increment of business value that the sprint will deliver through the completion of associated user stories and tasks.
The sprint goal serves to bring coherence and direction to the team’s efforts during the sprint. An effective sprint goal will provide clarity on the purpose behind the selected sprint backlog items rather than prescribe specific solutions. Well-defined sprint goals will align to product vision, be grounded in user needs, and focus the team on delivering value.
Arguments in Favor of Using Sprint Goals
Provides Clarity and Alignment for the Team
Proponents argue that an explicit sprint goal helps provide purpose and coherence for the team as they undertake work within the sprint. By encapsulating the key objective and desired outcome, a sprint goal allows team members to align their efforts accordingly.
This alignment on priorities and purpose can enhance team morale as members gain satisfaction through effectively progressing a clearly defined goal. Further, alignment ensures that testing, code reviews and other supporting activities also center around delivering the stated objective.
Helps Prioritize User Stories and Tasks
During sprint planning processes, the sprint goal helps guide the selection and sequencing of user stories within the sprint backlog. By referring back to the overarching goal, the product owner and team can determine which user stories are most central in supporting the goal versus those that may be secondary or deferrable.
Likewise, the goal provides an importance weighting on specific development, testing and other tasks associated with the user stories. Teams can classify tasks that directly enable the goal as high priority and those less tied to the goal as lower priority items.
Focuses Efforts on Business Value Delivered
Sprint goals place emphasis on furthering user and business needs rather than solely completing software features. Goals should be grounded in delivering some incremental value to stakeholders and advancing the product vision.
By referring back to goals throughout the sprint process, product owners can help ensure that teams are not losing sight of the client and market requirements underlying the user stories they work on. This business focus helps ensure that real user value is built with each software increment.
Arguments Against Using Sprint Goals
Can Limit Flexibility and Adaptability
Critics argue that overly rigid sprint goals may constrain the agility of a team to adapt requirements or work items within a sprint. If goals prescribe specific features rather than incremental value, it can be difficult to react and incorporate new user feedback or changing priorities.
Likewise, strict adherence to a pre-defined goal may limit the incorporation of technical debt reduction, defect resolution and other support work that arises within the fixed sprint duration. There are concerns sprint goals overly focus teams on a defined outcome at the expense of responding to a dynamic project environment.
Adds More Process Overhead
Some argue that sprint goals insert additional up-front work and documentation overhead into sprint planning and ongoing review processes. The work to define, document, communicate and assess progress on goals can be seen as indirect non-value activities.
If sprint goals and associated processes become excessively complex this can begin to erode rather than enhance agility. Striving for simplicity of process is a core agile principle that must be weighed relative to the intended benefits goals offer.
Difficult to Set Effectively
It can be challenging for product owners and teams to translate higher-level product roadmaps and vision into effective sprint-level goals consistently across a project lifecycle. Goals that are misaligned with the product direction or user needs, poorly scoped relative to team capacity, or inadequately communicated fail to offer the intended benefits.
Developing the skills and experience to craft valuable sprint goals places demands on product owners in particular. The strengths of individual product owners have a marked impact on the usefulness of any sprint goal process implemented.
Best Practices for Leveraging Sprint Goals
Keep Goals High-Level and Non-Prescriptive
Goals that focus on the ‘why’ over the ‘how’ avoid excessively constraining team members while still providing purposeful direction. High-level goals provide clarity of purpose without prescribing solutions that may limit flexibility.
Goals citing broad user needs and value creation over specific software features enable teams to still creatively explore alternative solution approaches in fulfilling those needs.
Align Goals to Product Vision and Roadmap
Sprint goals should clearly reflect and further the long-term vision for the product offering. Consistent linkage between sprint-level goals and the roadmap communicating the vision to stakeholders and teams ensures ongoing purposeful delivery.
When sprint goals are evidently aligned to roadmap themes and strategic initiatives they provide compelling context on the value of team efforts in incrementally advancing those strategic aims.
Review and Adjust Goals as Needed
If major deviations in scope or resourcing emerge during a sprint that inhibits pursuing the original goal, teams should re-assess the goal context. Significant changes in context may require tweaking or reformulating goals so they remain meaningful and useful to guide teams.
Some agility is required not just in the team operationally but in being able to adjust strategic guidance so that it sustains providing relevant direction amid fluid project environments.
Key Takeaways and Considerations
There are reasonable arguments on both sides of utilizing explicit sprint goals as part of agile methodologies. Goals can powerfully align teams while also adding process demands and the risk of limiting flexibility if applied dogmatically.
The arguments suggest that the decision on their use involves balancing contextual factors of team, product, organisation and project complexity. Teams must weigh up the expected coordination benefits relative to process efficiency demands within their operating environment.
However, when effectively formulated and aligned with vision, sprint goals will provide focus, priority assistance, and business linkage without unnecessarily compromising an agile team’s ability to respond change. As with all process and planning techniques, they should aim to provide support structures for the team rather than overly constrict behaviors.
