Jutta Eckstein

You are probably aware that Sprints are at the core of Scrum. Sprints are short cycles of no more than four weeks. Therefore, every team that applies Scrum will work in Sprints.

Unfortunately, some organizations do no more than have their teams work in Sprints. The work they perform often seems random, coming from various sources, and Sprints are often just isolated and disconnected chunks in time. Teams experience Sprints as treadmills instead of as a way to help them make purposeful progress. One of the problems these teams face is that they don’t know what the final or overall objective, or even direction, of their work is. They just know what is expected in a Sprint. But without knowing overarching objectives, each and every single Sprint becomes meaningless—and, therefore, a treadmill. I remember a team member once describing this as “continuous Sprints.” This extreme statement actually tells us that their Sprints are neither planned nor measured. Sprints are just boxes in time in which people do stuff.

Yet, by not planning a Sprint and then measuring it afterward, you will never know the real state of your project. You can’t tie your lessons learned (for example, how much can you accomplish during the Sprint) back to the overall objective. Therefore, you will only know at the very end whether or not the overall objective will be reached.

So, you need to plan and measure your Sprints. Team members will split business-selected features into tasks, estimate them, and assess whether the work is doable during the next Sprint. I recommend checking the following:

• Does the availability in the upcoming Sprint look sufficient for accomplishing the work?

• How much were you able to accomplish in the last Sprint, and can you assume that you’ll be able to accomplish the same amount in the next one? (This technique is often called “yesterday’s weather,” and, over time, finding out the average of what you can accomplish during a Sprint makes you—as a team—very reliable.)

If your availability is the same as it was in the past Sprint, it is actually enough to just cross-check with the second bullet. However, sometimes there are major differences regarding availability based on vacation, sickness “season,” further education, or assignments elsewhere.

Then, at the end of the Sprint, you should measure how much you have actually accomplished in the past Sprint. First of all, celebrate the achievements, and secondly, take those measurements into account when planning the next Sprint, as well when updating your assumptions about the overall objective.