What if the Scrum Team Fulfills the Sprint Goal Before the End of the Sprint?
Fleeting- External reference: https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/27888/what-to-do-when-theres-not-enough-work-related-to-the-sprint-goal
what if the scrum team fulfills the spring goal before the end of the sprint?
If the developers fulfil the sprint goal before the end of the sprint or think they finally won’t be able to make it by the end of the sprint, they have to renegotiate the scope of the sprint goal to make it fit. This means that in the beginning, most sprint will end with discussions with the product owner to adjust the scope.
It is likely that in the long run, the team will find a way to imagine sprint goals that will adjust more and more with the sprint time.
finding a Sprint Goal to a diverse team
- External reference: https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/40788/finding-sprint-goal-diverse-team
Finding a Sprint Goal to a diverse team
the UX/UI is working on features that will go into development in 2-3 Sprints. And the Automation engineer is working on features that have been developed half a year ago
What purpose does a Sprint serve, in this case? It doesn’t sound as though people are collaborating on achieving a “Done” and releasable increment each Sprint, and have little use for the empirical process control Scrum provides.
— https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/40788/finding-sprint-goal-diverse-team
If you were using Scrum, then the entire team would be working on the same bodies of work that would deliver a potentially releasable increment of value at the end of the Sprint.
— https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/40788/finding-sprint-goal-diverse-team
being committed towards the sprint goal does not necessarily mean always working towards it
Also, the sprint goal is said to be a commitment to be done by the end of the sprint, but not at all that the sprint goal should be the only thing on what we work. If the team finishes the goal early, then can work on something else, provided that it is the next action that is the most valuable (the product owner’s role is to help assessing this). The only thing that changes is that the team is not committed to end this by the end of the sprint.
Also, even if the scrum team is cross-functional, that does not mean that everyone can work on the sprint goal at any point in time. It makes sense them to let team members that cannot work towards the sprint goal work on the next most important things that they can move forward. The only imperative of the method is to have the whole team committed towards the sprint goal. That means that in at some point, the developers that could not contribute can contribute, then they should fill the duty to let their work behind to focus on the sprint goal. Also, they have the duty to still feel concerned about this goal and react whenever they realize they have some important information that would help.
Tools like jira help with this, as one can put some tickets into the “jira sprint”. As long as the team always focus on the sprint goal, they should be able to now what tickets are needed to be done by the end of the sprint to fulfil the goal and what are only meant to sill have work to do when one cannot contribute to the sprint goal. Also, the “jira sprint” can be adjusted at will, as long as the team always keep in mind the sprint goal to fulfil. We could even imagine that all the tickets of the “jira sprint” could be dropped and a bunch of new ones are added, as long as the scrum team feels confident that the sprint goal is still to be achieved.
the Sprint ends when the timebox expires. Unfinished Sprint Backlog Items go back to the Product Backlog and can be addressed in the following Sprint.
— https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/6171/what-do-if-team-cannot-finish-all-items-sprint
other than utilization metrics, if “the most important business goal” is being routinely met each iteration, why does it matter that the Sprint isn’t being packed to the brim? Assuming that your Sprint length and goal selection processes are already optimal (which is arguable), what is the process or business problem that results from the excess slack or busywork
problem was centered around goal selection. Exacerbated by an over-busy PO unable to devote sufficient time to the Backlog
sprint goal is a solution to a problem.
question to ask yourself then is:
Given we do not have enough work to do for the Sprint Goal to fill two weeks for the Team, are we losing focus as a team or are we struggling to understand the value of this sprint?
Sprint Goal is a focusing tool for the Development Team. It is not necessary for all work selected for a Sprint to be aligned with the Sprint Goal. In fact, I usually recommend that the Sprint Goal should be something that can be met through the completion of at most about 60-70% of the Product Backlog Items selected for the Sprint.
If the Development Team is aware of what work is directly supporting the Sprint Goal and what work isn’t, it gives them flexibility to self-organize and self-manage toward achieving the goal
. If things come up and the effort to do the work that is aligned with the Sprint Goal ends up being more than expected, there’s a little bit of buffer room and the team knows what work is most important to focus on
if this was an odd circumstance that happened in one sprint, I’d shrug and move on.
your view of the product is too short-sighted. Scrum is meant to be rapidly adaptive and planning should be just-in-time, but it is possible to take this too far. If you are only looking one small feature out, you may be creating problems for yourself
your sprints are work-focused, not increment-focused. A lot of teams make this mistake. They load up the sprint with work tasks, then try to form a sprint goal. In all fairness, the scrum guide points people in this direction, which is problematic. A team should start by understanding what would be a great increment of the product and then pull in the necessary backlog items to fulfill that. If this is the case, if that increment is too small, you just describe a bigger increment
sprint goal is typically a short missive you can communicate in business terms. For instance,
We want to deliver the customer profile page
artifact of people must appear busy comes from an idea that time spent working is valuable, as opposed to its outcomes
The business is paying for these people whether or not the business goal is met, so let’s try to get as much out of them as possible, is the the thinking.
the slack time afforded by a sprint whose goal was completed early is a blessing for you and your team
Use this time to scaffold, or adapt to environmental change, or react to changes by external actors (like making your build system more resilient to NPM outages if you run a node.js stack, for instance), or to refactor or improve the maintainability of your system.