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In my 20+ years of experience in software industry, I have come across various teams with varied durations of sprint cycle, ranging from one week to as long as six weeks. From what I’ve observed and understood, the longer the sprint duration, the less agile the processes and teams become, often resembling traditional waterfall methodologies more than Agile. To achieve the best outcomes, teams should continuously move towards shorter sprint durations.

 

The essence of agility

Agile, at its core, is about responsiveness, adaptability, and continuous feedback. The Agile Manifesto emphasizes individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responsiveness to change. The choice of sprint duration is an indicator of how well a team has aligned to these principles.

 

An Analogy: Speedboat vs. Cargo Ship

Imagine an Agile team as a vessel navigating the waters of product development. A team operating with shorter sprints is like a speedboat—quick, nimble, and able to make rapid course corrections based on new information. If an obstacle appears ahead, the team can swiftly adjust its trajectory without losing much progress.

Conversely, a team running longer sprints resembles a cargo ship—large, slow, and requiring significant effort to change direction. By the time the ship realizes it needs to pivot, it may have already drifted far off course, making corrections costly and time-consuming.

Just like a speedboat is better suited for navigating dynamic environments, shorter sprints enable teams to respond effectively to changing requirements and market demands, keeping them agile and competitive.

 

The case for shorter Sprints

Teams operating with shorter sprint cycles (1-2 weeks) tend to exhibit the following traits:

• Faster feedback loops: Frequent reviews ensure that any deviations from the goal are quickly identified and corrected.
• Higher adaptability: Teams can pivot and adjust their plans based on evolving requirements or user feedback.
• Improved stakeholder engagement: Regular demos and touch-points keep stakeholders involved, reducing misalignment and quicker course corrections.
• Increased sense of urgency: A shorter time-frame fosters a focus on delivering small, incremental improvements, enhancing overall productivity.
• Smaller releases: A shorter duration ensures smaller releases and hence easy to review, test and deploy.
• Reliance on automation: Teams end up relying more on automated unit tests and automated regression test to ensure quick testing.
• Automated deployment: A shorter sprint cycle is achieved by automating the deployment and setting up healthy continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous delivery.

 

The pitfalls of longer Sprints

On the other hand, teams following longer sprint cycles (3-6 weeks) often struggle with agility due to:

• Delayed feedback: The longer it takes to complete a sprint, more time it takes for the issues or misalignments to be identified.
• Reduced adaptability: Changes become more difficult to incorporate mid-sprint, leading to rigidity.
• Increased risk of scope creep: With a longer time-window, teams may take on too much work, leading to missed deadlines, spillover and technical debt.
• Stakeholder disengagement: Less frequent demos and feedback sessions can result in stakeholder disengagement and misaligned expectations.
• Larger units of work: With longer duration at hand, the tendency for the team is to not put effort to make stories smaller and hence work with larger units of work, resulting in difficult and increased review and testing time.
• Lack of automation: These teams often lack comprehensive unit testing, automated regression suites, automated continuous integration and continuous deployment.

 

Why teams end up with longer sprints

Despite the clear benefits of shorter sprints, many teams still gravitate toward longer sprint durations. Common reasons include:

• Complexity of work: Teams working on highly complex or research-driven tasks may feel that longer sprints provide more breathing room to complete deliverables.
• Lack of agile maturity: Teams transitioning from traditional methodologies may struggle to break work into smaller, manageable chunks.
• Inefficient processes: Lack of User Story detailing, unclear acceptance criteria and cumbersome approval workflows can make short sprints seem impractical.
• Lack of unit testing: When teams have not setup enough unit testing and are relying completely on QA Teams for testing.
• Large product and not enough automation: When teams have not invested in automation regression testing, QA teams end up taking long time to do regression testing.
• Lack of confidence: When code base is brittle and highly coupled, changes in one place tend to break the system in unpredictable areas and hence they gravitate to larger sprint duration hoping to spend more time to ensure product stability.
• Stakeholder expectations: Some stakeholders, especially in enterprise settings, may prefer longer sprints for detailed progress tracking rather than frequent, incremental updates.
• Fear of change: Teams accustomed to longer sprints may resist change, fearing increased workload pressure or disruptions in their current workflow.

 

Moving Towards the Shortest Sprint Duration

While some teams may initially struggle with shorter sprints, the benefits far outweigh the challenges. Teams should actively strive to shorten their sprint durations by incorporating following changes:

• Smaller user stories: Teams should aggressively reduce the user story size and focusing on incremental delivery will help ensure that value is provided continuously.
• Emphasizing cross-functional collaboration: Encouraging faster communication and decision-making enable shorter cycles.
• Unit testing: Encouraging team members to write automated unit testing will help to build developer confidence on making changes to the code base.
• Automating regression testing: Investing in QA to build automated regression test suites will help reduce the overall regression time.
• Continuous integration: Setting up automated continuous integrations that builds the code base, runs unit tests, runs security scans and alerts team on failure will help ensure that code base is always in ready state to deploy.
• Continuous deployment: Push button deployments help reduce time spent in deploying changes to various environments.
• Artifact management: Preserving artifacts from QA deployments with the intent to propagate them to higher environment without rebuild ensures what QA signs-off is what is getting deployed to higher environment.
• Feature flagging: Building feature flagging at the core of the system allows teams to deploy changes confidently as now they can quickly turn a feature or change off without having to rollback the entire release.

 

Conclusion

Agility is not just about following Agile rituals but about how teams are positioned to respond to change. Shorter sprint cycles foster responsiveness, frequent feedback, and adaptability, keeping teams aligned with Agile principles. Longer sprints increase rigidity and diminish agility. To achieve the best outcomes, teams should continuously strive towards the shortest possible sprint duration, ensuring that they remain highly adaptive and efficient.