Sprint
Depending on the characteristics of the project and the team's judgement, sprints usually last no less than one week and no more than one month. Most commonly, they always have the same length, setting a cadence, but this cadence may evolve or be adjusted.
Characteristics
When starting to work with Scrum, it is advisable to consider the sprint as the event that contains all the others:
- It sets the pace of daily progress and makes it possible to visualize and share it in the Daily Scrum.
- It sets a fixed rhythm for checking product development in Sprint Planning and Sprint Review.
- Retrospectives are held at that same rhythm, to reflect and improve. In more mature adoptions of Scrum, however, the scope of the sprint can be considered to be only the building of the increment, leaving the meetings aside. This may be of interest to the team, for example, to calculate sprint velocity considering only working time, excluding the opening, closing, and retrospective meetings; to have greater flexibility when running sprints of different lengths; or to decouple the frequency of retrospectives from that of sprints.
Principle and values
- Continuous improvement: the pace of progress in iterations makes it possible to detect problems early and to continuously improve both the product and the process. At the end of each sprint, the team has tangible evidence of what has worked and what needs to change.
- Timeboxing: the fixed length of the sprint acts as an engine of progress, counters Parkinson's Law, and creates the urgency needed to prioritize and make decisions.
- Transparency and inspection: the sprint produces visible results at regular intervals, which allows stakeholders to inspect the product's actual progress—not documents or estimates—and adapt the direction if necessary.
Common mistake
Extending the sprint when there is unfinished work. The sprint end date is fixed. If the team does not complete all the committed work, the right response is to adjust the scope (leaving stories for the next sprint), not to extend the sprint. Extending the sprint to "get everything done" destroys the cadence, removes the point of inspection and learning, and masks the planning problems that need to be solved.
Resources
📄 Scrum Master v.4.0 [in Spanish]Free download · Scrum Manager
📄 Scrum Master en equipos con IA [Scrum Master in Teams with AI, in Spanish]Free download · Scrum Manager
See also
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