Understand your team's progress toward medium and long-term objectives with Keypup's Sprint Depth Metric. This metric measures the number of issues and pull requests that are due in a period of plus or minus 3 months, providing visibility into your roadmap execution and helping you track progress toward quarterly or semester-based goals.
Understanding the Sprint Depth Metric
Sprint depth metrics measure the total number of items included in current medium or long-term objectives such as quarters or semesters. In addition to the sprint progress chart metric, this metric depicts the comprehensive scope of your planned work over an extended timeframe.
Key Benefits of Sprint Depth Tracking
- Roadmap visibility: Gain a clear view of how many items are scheduled for your medium-term objectives, helping you understand the scope of upcoming work.
- Progress monitoring: Track whether your team is maintaining appropriate depth throughout the sprint cycle or experiencing unexpected changes.
- Capacity planning: Use sprint depth trends to inform capacity planning and resource allocation decisions.
How to Use the Sprint Depth Metric
Since your project management tool may already provide such information, the sprint depth metric does not necessarily have to match your actual ongoing sprints. Instead, align this metric with your roadmap sprints, which may be based on quarters or semesters. It will give you a better idea of how close you are to achieving your mid-term goals.
Expected Sprint Depth Patterns
- Beginning of sprint: This metric should increase quickly as items are added to the roadmap.
- Throughout the sprint: The metric should slowly rise as new items are identified and added.
- End of sprint: The metric should remain consistent as the team completes planned work.
Warning Signs to Investigate
A major shift after the sprint start should be investigated, as it may indicate a drastic change in the engineering team's implementation schedule and a need for internal reorganization. Significant deviations from expected patterns could signal:
- Changes in business priorities requiring roadmap adjustments
- Capacity constraints affecting planned work
- Need for team reorganization or resource reallocation
Optimize Your Roadmap Planning
By aligning sprint depth metrics with your roadmap sprints based on quarters or semesters, you gain better understanding of how close you are to your mid-term objectives and can make informed decisions about scope, capacity, and priorities.