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Prejudice: Scrum lacks an overview
12-05-2008
How agile are you?
15-05-2008

Quick Poll Results: Sprint Duration

Published by Peter Stevens on 15-05-2008
Categories
  • duration
  • Getting Started
  • poll
  • sprint length
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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!

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Peter Stevens
Peter Stevens

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2 Comments

  1. savaged says:
    07-08-2010 at 13:35

    I note some teams have a variable sprint duration. Is this a "Scrum smell" or is there any merit in it?

  2. Peter says:
    07-08-2010 at 13:41

    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

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