Collaboration & Process › Agile & Delivery Process
Sprint
A fixed period, often two weeks, to deliver planned work.
Also known as: iteration
A sprint is a fixed period in which a team plans, builds and reviews a set of work. Many teams use two-week sprints, though the length is a team choice. In Scrum, a sprint is no longer than one month.
A sprint usually follows this rhythm:
- Planning: the team picks items from the top of the backlog and agrees on a sprint goal.
- Work: the team delivers the items, with daily check-ins at the standup.
- Review: the team shows what was finished to stakeholders.
- Retrospective: the team looks at how the sprint went and what to change.
The scope is normally fixed once the sprint starts. New urgent work can still come in, but adding it routinely means the team can’t finish what it committed to.
The classic mistake is treating the sprint as a deadline to cram into. A sprint that always overflows teaches the team to plan for less, not to plan better. Size each sprint’s commitments to what the team actually finishes, and use the retrospective to learn from what didn’t fit.