Brian Hartsock's Blog

One of the nice things about Scrum is the lack of rules. There aren’t a lot. And the rules that are given, should be changed over time. Scrum, like development, is an iterative process of continual improvement. A very important part of the Scrum process is sprint length.

If you’re thinking I am going to tell you an ideal sprint length, you are wrong. My Scrum tip of the day is just to make sure you’re adjusting sprint length based on many different factors.

There are a few very important things to look at when deciding on sprint length.

• How volatile are priorities? If they change very often, long sprints are going to get interrupted, whether you like it or not.
• How big is the team? A big team means sprint planning can be very painful. Do you want to have shorter, but more often plannings? Or longer, but less frequent plannings?
• More meetings. The more often sprint plannings are, the more often demos and retrospectives are. This can quickly drain product owners and stake holders that are part of multiple projects.
• And the biggie, motivation. Long sprints can have lulls in motivations. Short sprints seem to keep motivation a little higher, and the team focuses more. The power of short iterations to give a team motivation is one of the greatest strengths of Scrum in my opinion. Don’t forget about it

I know what you’re thinking, “great, but how does this help me?”. All I can tell you is what I have experienced.

Smaller teams seem to gravitate towards short sprints, around two to three weeks. Planning’s are pretty simple and quick. The short sprint allows for the team to turnaround things really quickly, and I personally like it a lot as product owner.

Larger teams are the opposite. Even though larger teams usually have more volatile priorities, they can’t stand planning meetings so they space them out more. Most of the larger teams do a 3-4 week sprint.

My tip to you, play around with everything from 2 to 4 weeks. Anything shorter, and you have too many meetings. Anything longer, and priorities can shift too much and motivation starts to slide.