Important Metrics in Sprint Report?

How Sprint Report plays an important role in giving clear picture to stake holders on Team’s progress

At the end of each sprint, it is important to publish a sprint report to stakeholders and management. This is to showcase and appraise the progress the team made. Sprint reports can have various metrics. I will talk about the sprint report used in my last organization. Maybe it will help others to have an idea about what a good sprint report looks like.

|| Team Temperature

It is a small survey that will run at the time of the sprint retrospective. The survey link is shared with the team before retro. The team can discuss the survey results in retrospective. It gives an idea to SM and management on how the team felt about the sprint. This survey usually contains two questions. The first one is how the team felt about the sprint on a scale of 1 to 10. The second question is a free text field where the team expresses their feelings in one word like Awesome, great, busy, stuck, etc.

Sprint Report
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|| Customer Engagement

It is a small survey that runs post sprint review. The Survey link was shared with the PO and stakeholders to get their feedback in the same fashion. This survey contains two questions. The first one is how stakeholders felt about the sprint on a scale of 1 to 10. The second question is a free text field where they would express their feelings in one word like Awesome, bad, exciting, etc.

|| Sprint Burndown Chart

This chart usually comes from tools like Jira, VersionOne, etc. It is configurable in confluence and can pull burndown charts directly from Jira. This would give an idea about how the team completed stories in the sprint. There are a few interpretations of the Burndown chart. Like if the team was delivering stories throughout the sprint or moved to do so at the end of the sprint. Similarly, a flat line on a burndown chart shows a blocker due to some impediments.

|| Velocity Chart

This chart would display how the team has been delivering in terms of Velocity. Planned story points vs actual completed story points are shown here. It shows previous sprint velocities to compare with current sprint velocity. Any scope change that happened in between the sprints is also shown here. It is configurable in confluence and can pull data from Jira directly. With other tools, it is ok to place screenshots in the report directly.

|| Release Burnup Chart

This chart would show release-level progress made by the team. How the team is moving towards release commitment. It depicts scope changes, if any item is added or removed from the backlog. It would represent the current estimated timeline to complete the committed work. Management gets an idea of whether the team will be able to complete the committed work or not. Is the team looking for some help to handle any challenges or impediments?

|| Sprint Achievements

This will talk about what was team’s sprint goal and what the team could achieve in this sprint. Scrum Master or Leads would manually capture this information. This contains high-level updates about the team’s achievements in the form of a small bullet-pointed list. The team mentions major releases and milestones.

|| Next Sprint Plan

This will talk about the team’s goal for the upcoming sprint and what the team planning to achieve in the next sprint. This would be also a high level plan only.

|| Retro Actions

Tracking action items is also important. Therefore retro action items should have the owner along with time line to close each action item.

 || Risk & Impediments

The team mentions all open risks and impediments are there. The team talks about how these risks and impediments impact current and upcoming work. Also, if the team has any mitigation plan, they can mention that.

Hope this information would help you. Thanks.

Refer Scrum Guide for more information on all events, roles and artifacts.