Sprint Stability

What is Sprint Stability

Sprint Stability highlights the ability of a team to work with a stable set of requirements during a sprint.

Why Sprint Stability matters

This is a measure that entirely depends on your team’s context.

A core principle of applying the agile method is that teams welcome change in requirements, even late in development. As such, changing requirements may 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.

Unstable requirements during a sprint however may 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.

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.

What ‘good’ Sprint Stability 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, lower 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?

Tips for a more stable sprint