How long should your sprint run? What's the optimum time to take a pause, look back and adapt?

The first thing that you observe about Agile is that the methodology itself is agile!?You choose what fits your requirement the most and Agile gives you the privilege of designing the way you want to run the project! ?

Quickly let’s understand what’s a sprint! Sprint is a fixed period of time for the Team to focus and develop a product increment that could be released and showcased to customer. Most importantly,?an optimum sprint length would give the team time to make a difference in the product and should also support fail fast principle of agile.?

For the fact that the length should support fail fast principle, 4 weeks is way too long and I have rarely seen in any of my projects hence won’t discuss that option. Lets talk about only 2 or 3 weeks -?

Below are some data points to be referred while selecting 2 or a 3 week sprint -?

Two Week Sprint

What’s good -?

• Easier planning as the duration is less
• Team gets more opportunities to improve as retrospective is done every 2 weeks?
• Frequent sprint reviews that supports fail fast principle
• Impediments are highlighted more quickly?
• Forces agile teams to do a better job of slicing stories or features into smaller chunks. This increases visibility and understanding of progress within a Sprint.

What’s challenging -?

• Hard to make a huge difference within 2 weeks to the product
• It might be stressful for the teams as they need to be on the toes to deliver , adept and improve every 2 weeks
• Sprint planning , retrospectives take comparatively more time?

Three Week Sprint

What’s good -?

• Easier to start with!
• Team at times assume it would be easier to deliver value in 3 week sprint rather than 2 week sprint
• If requirements are clearer and business is engaged at regular intervals in the sprint then a 3 week sprint gives more productive hours to developers
• If the agile team is mature enough to learn quickly from their experienced than a 3 week sprint would reduce the overall time spent on meetings.?

What’s challenging -?

• Difficult to plan well for a longer sprint during planning sessions
• There is more possibilities for scope additions mid sprint as the duration is high
• Retrospective meetings would be done less frequently which means team would have less explicit opportunities to learn from their mistakes
• Team would need to plan their leaves well in advance for each sprint
• Higher engagement of business needed across the sprint to get feedback

I have worked on a life science project where we moved from 2 weeks to 3 weeks sprint. We were creating a product that worked in the labs to replace the existing paper based system.?

Facts that made us move to a longer 3 week sprint -?

• The requirements were fairly clear given the fact it was replacing a well laid legacy process
• Business availability wasn’t an issue?
• Solution and low level design was also clear for most of the parts as the project was initiated well in advance?
• Our team was a mature agile team having rich experience delivering in SAFe agile

In some cases I have heard a one week sprint as well but that in my opinion would lead to a lot of dysfunction and dissatisfaction among business and agile teams.Best to avoid.?

Few important points on changing the sprint length mid of the project before we wrap up -?

1. Never change the length of the sprint once you have started?
2. Changing the sprint duration must be justified with valid reasons and agreed with all key stakeholders
3. Increasing the duration would need more engagement of business through out the sprint to ensure team is on the right direction
4. Changing the duration mid of the development is a challenge and should be dealt with caution

Hope the article gave you a fair idea on how do you decide the sprint length, the pros and cons of 2/3 weeks and what challenges you face while changing the length of the sprint! Do share your feedback and experiences from your projects too.?

Thanks,

Mohit M Makhija