Prejudice: Scrum lacks an overview
12-05-2008How agile are you?
15-05-2008
Following the discussions both elsewhere and on this blog about sprint duration, the questions poses itself – what is the preferred sprint length? So I ran a poll.
And the winner is… 2 weeks.
According to this very scientific survey (1 week on my blog, 228 Visitors, 50 votes), the most popular sprint duration is 2 weeks, followed by (early leader) 3 weeks, which lost by one vote.
The final results are:
1 week | 2 (4%) |
2 week | 18 (36%) |
3 week | 17 (34%) |
4 week | 5 (10%) |
1 month | 5 (10%) |
longer, but fixed | 5 (10%) |
variable | 1 (2%) |
How long should the sprint be? There are many right answers, some of which argued for longer sprints:
- The longest time you can shield your team from changes in work
- bigger/harder stories imply longer sprints
But most argued for shorter sprints:
- It should be short compared to the length of the project
- Quicker response to changes/new information
- More and earlier data points for measuring velocity
- Achieving closure – there is a feeling of success associated with a successful sprint – the more often the better
- Agility (and ROI) – the shorter sprint sprint, the quicker you can get functionality to the customer or user
- Feedback – the sprint end is a chance to learn from the customer and from yourselves – the more often the better
- Reliability of Commitment – the deadlines are nearer, the committments fresher in your memory
Very short sprints, i.e. 1 week are appropriate for very short projects, say 1 month. To do a 4 week project in 1 sprint, or even 2, does not leave much opportunity for feedback.
Mike Cohn pointed out:
3-week sprints have become very popular over the last 12-18 months. Before then most teams considered them odd 😉 Seriously, it’s a recent change for most teams
And the closing word:
The preferred sprint duration is the one that works best for your team 🙂
–Dmitry Beransky
I’ll second that!
Thanks to Dmitry, Ben, Ash, Ilja, Paul, Kiran, Paddy, and Brett for their comments, as well as to everyone who voted!
2 Comments
I note some teams have a variable sprint duration. Is this a "Scrum smell" or is there any merit in it?
Hi Savaged,
It's considered to be a smell. According to Jeff Sutherland's latest Scrum-But test, an iteration length of 4 weeks or less is good. If the sprint length is longer or variable, this has been found to be a sign of lower performance.
Cheers,
Peter