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It is very odd that the two week cadence gets referred to as a sprint. Sprints are definitionally not done at a speed that can be kept up for a long period of time, yet we expect our teams to 'sprint' unendingly.


Yet they are sprints by definition. There is no pause to evaluate the work, fix past mistakes, globally plan the system, understand how it will fit when applied.

Scrum only has the part when you get your head down and code. Finished it? Good, let's see what is the next task, get our heads down and code again. "Sprint" is a very apt name.

(Of course, that is because the activities that actually bring product quality got somebody specialized on them. You can't find a best portrait of the Western management culture looking at management, disenfranchise the workers that actually know how to do things, bring somebody with no skin on the game and plenty of conflicting interests to make all the decisions.)


Scrum also has the sprint planning and retrospective phases in between the sprints. Many teams also take time to do "backlog refinement" as a second-order sprint planning process.

My scrum trainer said, with full conviction, "I've never seen a retrospective done well that took less than four hours."

Nobody does Scrum. Everybody just does the part where you have a defined list of tasks for a sprint and burn it down until you get close enough to zero before the next sprint starts. It's called "scrum-but."


You want people to do deep planing in a few hours in a meeting? That's not how people behave.


That's an interesting take. Are sprints sustainable?




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