“Materialised” view of the Sprint Goal and consequences of its absence

Question

The Scrum guide defines the Sprint Goal as:

an objective that will be met within the Sprint through the implementation of the Product Backlog, and it provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.

However, I am a bit confused about the proper understanding of what is the Sprint Goal in terms of the tools which are conventionally used for leveraging Scrum and what happens if it doesn't have any well defined form?

Let's say we use Jira with a standard Scrum board, which allows us to represent the Product and Sprint backlogs. Also we use a kind of Confluence system, where we can track history of Sprint Retrospective.

In this terms, where and in which view the Sprint Goal should be described? Should it be a Confluence page with the pretty clear defined Sprint Goal? If we don't have anything like that, what mostly like could happen?

Answer 1

If you use Jira, you can add a Sprint Goal to your Scrum board. If you are viewing a single Sprint, you can see this Sprint Goal right below the Sprint Title, but it's not visible if you're viewing multiple active Sprints on the same board. It's also visible on the Sprint Report page for the Sprint.

As far as I know, there's no way to get a Sprint Goal displayed on a Confluence page, but there may be plugin(s) to support this functionality. You can link Confluence pages to Sprint Reports and other Jira tickets.

If you're using the Atlassian suite, using this makes the most sense since it's built into the tool suite.

A Sprint Goal, in most cases, isn't useful beyond the Sprint. Its purpose is to guide the team when making decisions and tradeoffs on what work to take on in the Sprint as new work is discovered or becomes more clear. There's probably little value in duplicating your Sprint Goals onto a Confluence page, since it's not necessary after your Sprint Retrospective. However, linking any kind of Sprint documentation to your Sprint Reports (or other Jira artifacts) can link documentation back to goals.