What is it
Sprint Stability highlights the ability of a team to maintain stable requirements during development of a sprint.
Why it matters
A core principle of remaining agile is that teams welcome change in requirements, even late in development
Unstable requirements during a sprint can be the result of insufficiently planned work. This phenomenon can also be referred to as scope creep and is closely linked to increases in costs and projects going over budget.
Having stable requirements increases confidence in a team’s ability to plan, accurately estimate and complete a set goal.
Stable requirements provide a team with a stable goal (fixed scope) to work towards. This can build confidence and lead to a team being able to ship features more predictably.
Conversely, changing requirements may also reflect legitimate shift in priorities, or a response to discoveries that require a change in approach. It can also be reflective of a team’s adaptability in responding to the changing needs of their product manager or customer.
What ‘good’ looks like
Your team’s context is the best arbiter of what ‘good’ looks like for your team.
When a team focuses on improving their speed or progress, high levels of stability are favoured. Use Umano to manage the expectations of your team and peers with a clear eye on the assigned tasks, and work with your Product Manager to document and requested changes so they can be reviewed and prioritised when planning for your next sprint.
If your team has prioritised being responsive to customers, low levels of stability can be expected.
Look out for patterns relating to constantly changing requirements over time. This can be reflective of not enough time spent planning, or breaking down stories relating to the sprint goals into smaller, better understood tasks. This pattern can lead the team to feeling like they are ‘spinning wheels’, lacking in a sense of completion and progress. Changing requirements may also have a greater impact on a team the later that the changes are made.
How Umano measure this
Umano measures Stability of Requirements through:
No new tickets added or removed after starting of the sprint
JIRA fields; summary, description, acceptance criteria, story points are not edited, whereby the summary and description fields are weighted less than acceptance criteria and story points.
A score of 100% means that the sprint was executed as planned without updates to requirements or new work.
Practices that influence this measure
Number of tickets removed from planned sprints
Number of tickets added to a sprint in progress
For planned Stories:
Change ratio of Title
Change ratio of Descriptions
Change ratio of Acceptance Criteria
Change ratio of estimated size (story points or time)
What’s included?
Included | Not included |
|---|---|
Adding or updating the Jira description, story points or acceptance | Adding comments to a Jira ticket Adding or updating a label or tag on a Jira ticket |
Tips for a more stable sprint
Involve, where possible, the whole team in planning and backlog grooming.
Break stories and task down to smaller tasks.
Discuss dependencies for each tasks.
Invest in stakeholder management to avoid new work being enforced upon the team mid sprint.
Resources
predictability/ reliability
Atlassian playbooks
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