Sprint Cancellation
'Sprint cancellations consume resources, since everyone regroups in another Sprint Planning to start another Sprint. Sprint cancellations are often traumatic to the Scrum Team, and are very uncommon.'
As scrum framework helps to realize agility, should not sprint cancellation also be a part of the agility and as scrum team readily accepts and expects changes this should also be considered on similar lines.
If Sprint cancellation was normal, wouldn’t goals be less likely to be achieved? What effect might this have on empirical process control in a complex environment?
It could be wasteful, depending on the stage when it was cancelled and the applicability of the value of the work done for the upcoming sprints, but its likely to happen for complex projects and the current speed at which the business priorities and needs changes.
Sure, agility expects and embraces change. In a Scrum context this means for example that Backlog Items might undergo inspection and adaption. But what if the Sprint's whole goal is obsolete? Lucky enough, this is a rather rare situation. In this case a simple inspection and adaption is not enough. A new Sprint Goal is needed an with it a whole new planning. Only then a new Sprint is needed, canceling the current one.
A simple change in priorities would not make the Sprint Goal obsolete. Given the short duration of a Sprint, the new priorities can be worked on soon enough. Here the Product Owner has an important role to help business develop more stable priorities.
As scrum framework helps to realize agility, should not sprint cancellation also be a part of the agility and as scrum team readily accepts and expects changes this should also be considered on similar lines.
Well the option does exist, hence it's described in the Scrum Guide. Agility allows for a quick change of direction, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't know to some extent where you want to go. Frequently having to cancel Sprints suggests a lack of vision about where the product is going.
A Sprint Goal should provide the team with an overriding result that they want to achieve by the end of the Sprint. It is not the same as a list of items from the product backlog. If Sprints are the right length, it should be rare that the goal is no longer wanted during a Sprint or has become significantly less important than something else, even if particular items from the product backlog are no longer wanted or valid.