Sprint Health

Purpose

The sprint overview provides you insights into the general sprint health of your teams and the organisation. It shows interruptions from unplanned work and overall sprint overruns.

Improvement Actions: If sprints are overrun regularly, it might be helpful to assess the sprint planning or regulate the amount of unplanned/interrupting work coming in.

Similarly, if you have too many interruptions, it might be caused by insufficient planning or the lack of sprint policies.

Explanations

Sprint Overrun: The number of tickets that were scheduled in a given sprint, but did not make it to completion in that given sprint. A high percentage indicates an organisation that struggles to schedule complete tasks as planned. Reasons can be manifold, from underspecified tasks to inaccurate estimations or under-resourcing.

Planned/Unplanned Work: The number of tickets over time that were added after the sprint's start date as defined in Jira/GitHub Projects etc. Having frequently high levels of unplanned work means more interruptions, potential context switches and less delivery accuracy.

Sprint Investment: This shows the breakdown of tickets by their issue types over each sprint cycle as defined in Jira/GitHub Projects etc. It reflects the area where the organisation is investing their time, effort, and resources. Sometimes significant focus shifts are expected, other times it is symptomatic for larger issues such as a flood of bug tickets.

Good to Know

Sprint Health depends on a number of factors, including planning accuracy, fluctuation of staffing and additional interrupting work. Certain levels of overrun and interruptions often cannot be avoided, but it is worthwhile focussing on the trends here.