What are sprints insights in ZenHub?
Sprints insights provide you and your team with timely and contextual insights on your ongoing work and team processes. By incorporating automated sprints into your teams workflow, you'll be provided with actionable information when it's most useful.
Benefits of sprints insights
- Provides actionable information when it's most useful: Insights highlight sprint progress at a glance, directly from the Board. This makes it easier to identify if your team is on track to hit your sprint deadline.
- Highlights bottlenecks and potential blockers: Direct visibility into sprint progress and scope changes can alert you to any unexpected work or scope creep that could potentially risk the sprint goal.
- Helps improve the sprint planning process: Average velocity, comparisons to previous periods, and upcoming sprint dates help your team to understand how much value can be shipped, ensuring you don't overcommit or stretch yourselves too thin.
Insights and contextual information available
Sprint progress
When there is an ongoing sprint, you'll see sprint progress directly from the insights modal. The progress section will display the number of issues and story points completed for the current sprint. You can select the name of the current sprint to view the burndown report. This provides everyone on the team with a visualization of work complete and remaining for the current sprint. This insight helps teams understand, at a glance, if they are on track to meet their sprint deadline.
Scope changes
Beneath the sprint progress, you'll see scope changes highlighting any issues that were added to the sprint or removed from the sprint after the sprint began.
For example, if all items are complete within the sprint with additional time remaining, the team and product owner may decide to incorporate additional items into the sprint in line with the sprint goal. On the other hand, scope changes may also indicate scope creep as a result of poorly defined requirements. Having these insights available to you when it matters most, allows your team to more easily identify, understand, and respond accordingly.
Velocity and comparisons
Beneath scope changes, you'll see your team's average velocity. This highlights your team's historical speed of work and how much value can be delivered. For average velocity to be calculated, your team must have at least three completed sprints. Average velocity is calculated for up to seven completed sprints. Next to your average velocity, we'll display the change in your average velocity due to your last completed sprint.
The change in velocity is calculating the difference between two averages: this week’s average velocity and last week’s average velocity.
Example: You are in the middle of your 10th sprint. Your average velocity is based on sprints 3-9. Your previous average velocity was based on sprints 2-8. The change in velocity is the difference between those two averages.
Upcoming sprint
If there is an upcoming sprint scheduled within the next 3 days this will be shown in your daily insights. The title of your next sprint will be displayed which you can click on to bring you to the burndown report for the sprint. This insight reminds your team to ensure the sprint goal has been defined and that the backlog is prioritized.