Sprint

A sprint is a time-boxed development cycle in Scrum, typically one to four weeks and most commonly two. The team commits to a set of backlog items at the start, works only on those, and produces something potentially shippable by the end.

The surrounding ceremonies are planning, a daily standup, a review of what was built, and a retrospective on how the team worked.

Note that this is not the same as a design sprint, which is a five-day process for going from problem to tested prototype.

The tension for design work

A fixed cadence suits implementation, where the work is broadly known. It suits research badly, because useful research does not conclude reliably on a two-week boundary.

The standard resolution is dual-track: discovery runs continuously, delivery runs in sprints, and design for a feature lands a sprint or two before the sprint that builds it. See Agile UX.

The common failure

Design pulled into the current sprint to unblock developers. It feels efficient and it means nothing is ever validated before it is built, which converts the design function into production support.

In practice

The retrospective is the part that makes the rest work, and the part most often skipped when things are busy, which is exactly when it is needed.