At Sprint Planning a team writes its Sprint Goal as "complete the ten items we selected". The ten serve four unrelated initiatives. Mid-Sprint the Product Owner asks to swap one item out, and the Developers cannot say whether that endangers the Sprint Goal. What is the underlying problem?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework hard
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The options
Not correct Nothing is wrong with the Sprint Goal — it was agreed by the whole Scrum Team before Sprint Planning ended, which is all Scrum requires
Wrong. Agreeing something and agreeing an objective are different acts. A restatement of the item list satisfies the timing rule and none of the purpose behind it.
Not correct The problem is the number of items — ten is too many for the Developers to hold a single goal across
Wrong. Scrum sets no limit on selected items, and ten items serving one objective would be perfectly coherent. The count is not what makes this Sprint incoherent.
Not correct The Sprint Goal should have been written by the Product Owner alone, since they are accountable for the value of the product
Wrong, and it inverts the collaboration. The Product Owner proposes how the product could increase its value in this Sprint, and then the whole Scrum Team collaborates to define the Sprint Goal.
Correct The Sprint Goal is meant to be the single objective for the Sprint, creating coherence and focus so the team works together rather than on separate initiatives
Correct, and the swap request exposes it. A list of items restated as a goal gives the team nothing to judge a change against: the test for any mid-Sprint change is whether it endangers the Sprint Goal, and that test is unanswerable when the Sprint Goal is only the list itself.
Why
The Sprint Goal earns its place by doing two jobs the item list cannot. It creates coherence — one objective the Developers work toward together rather than in four private directions — and it gives the Sprint a fixed point, so scope can be renegotiated with the Product Owner without anyone losing the plot. Restate the selected items as the goal and you keep the ritual and lose both: nothing to inspect progress against at the Daily Scrum, and no way to answer whether a change is safe.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Commitment: Sprint Goal
- What it says
- The Sprint Goal also creates coherence and focus, encouraging the Scrum Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives.
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