Sprint Goal over Sprint Backlog Items — How I Changed My Focus
At present, in the modern Agile world, we are used to talking about goals. There are many articles, books, courses, and other sources of knowledge that explain to us why the goals are valuable for the software development process. As a result, the goals have become an integral part of our daily life. Yet it seems to me that many of us still struggle with the understanding of benefits of the goals, and do not know how they can change our focus and make software development more effective and life easier for teams. Many of us take the goals, such as OKRs and Sprint Goals as a formality because an organization or Scrum Guide obliges to set them. It had been my case when it comes to the Sprint Goal before I realized that my problem can be solved by primarily focusing on the Sprint Goal, while we plan our Sprints.
Problem
Our team does the two main activities: we maintain legacy software as well as develop a couple of new services at the same time. The legacy part of the system often brings new surprises during a Sprint (it is a common problem of all complex legacy systems, imagine you maintain an old car). You cannot ignore the major problems because ignoring prevents from keeping a product alive. Moreover, after each Sprint, stakeholders expect an increment to be delivered. How to be focused in such a case? Under such circumstances, a team may stray from the path and do not finalize many items to which it committed. It can make the team and stakeholders upset and demotivated. A solution could be splitting the team into two independent teams but I am not in favor of such an approach.
Solution
The Sprint Goal made the problem less significant and enabled us to commit to it instead of committing to items on the Sprint Backlog. After a change, I as a Product Owner, development team, and stakeholders speak the same language and try do not go through the list of individual items during the Sprint Demo. The Demo starts with the statement of the Sprint Goal. The development team demonstrates what is done. If the Sprint Goal is achieved, everybody knows that an increment and value are delivered. In such a case, the effort of the team is transparent, and everybody knows that the team did purposeful work.
In the past, during the Sprint Demo, going through the list of done and not finished items had a priority over talking about the Sprint Goal. Unfortunately, the status of many of the items does not show whether the value is delivered or not. Some of them can be still open. But the Sprint Goal can be achieved despite this fact. This achievement may be more important than unfulfilled items, especially for the stakeholders.
The Sprint Goal should be SMART. In our team, it is crafted by taking into consideration my ultimate objective (for example, my desired outcome is to speed up the performance of GUI by 50 %). This high-level objective is narrowed down to the SMART Sprint Goal (for example, the response time of a frame X is reduced twice). Thus, it is important that the Sprint Goal is created by the team because I find it difficult to create the SMART Sprint Goal on my own.
We tried to set two goals to be achieved during the Sprint. However, it resulted in the two SMAR goals (T is missed) due to not having enough time to achieve both of them because of the legacy stuff. Thus, we decided to set the most important goal only and keep working on the second one without committing to achieve it within one Sprint. In this case, we reduce the risk to fail the Sprint and contribute to the creation of room for ad-hoc tasks.
Conclusion
Our problem related to multitasking and unpredictable problems with the legacy software prevented us from being focused on what is most important during a Sprint. Specific attention to a Sprint Goal helped us to achieve it and do not commit to individual items. We made our work more transparent to ourselves and stakeholders. They understand purpose of our work better. Everybody can track delivery of value. The Sprint Goal is crafted by a team in a way to make it SMART.
