Summary

You need iterations/sprints long enough to build certain helpful habits, but once you’ve built those, you might safely leave iterations/sprints behind. This doesn’t make them dumb nor wasteful, but that seems to be how many people frame the matter, so I have to use the word for SEO.

Two-week sprints are dead. I think Agile is dead, too. — Charles Fry in a post on LinkedIn

This doesn’t surprise me. When I first saw “Naked Planning”1, I guessed that “weekly planning” or “iterations” or “sprints” would be among the first of the various Agile rituals for functioning workgroups to leave behind.2 If we talk daily and release frequently, then there is no need to let an iteration be 2-4 weeks long, nor even a week!

Even so, I never quite bought the whole “sprints are dumb/waste” meme. Just because you don’t need it, doesn’t mean nobody needs it. Just because you aren’t making good use of it doesn’t mean that nobody makes good use of it. 🤷

When Iterations/Sprints Help

If your group needs to establish heartbeat-type habits, then you’d probably benefit from iterations/sprints as a way to build those habits. Habits such as:

  • replanning as you learn about your group’s capacity to deliver
  • talking to each other throughout the day or throughout the week
  • reviewing each other’s work more often than merely when you think it’s ready to publish
  • showing partially-completed features to stakeholders to check that you’re on the right track

Once you have these habits, you might find timebox iterations superfluous. You might even find that they hold you back!

If your group needs to establish the habit of actually shipping features, rather than merely making progress on them indefinitely until someone gets tired and gives in, then you’d probably benefit iterations/sprints as a way to focus on finishing work. Of course, WIP limits can also do this job, but I like letting 10000 flowers bloom. Once you have this habit, you probably don’t need an arbitrary deadline to remind you to ship something.

Do you need iterations/sprints? Maybe.

I think it’s slightly better to do them and not need them than to need them and not do them. Even so, I sometimes help groups realize that they have the habits they need under their fingers and can stop waiting until the end of the month or a 4-week boundary to run their retrospective and update their planning boards.

  1. Arlo Belshee introduced me to this idea in the early 2000s and you’d likely recognize it today as the Kanban Method: WIP limits, visualization, and a single “express lane” for expediting urgent, unplanned work. One item at a time fits in the express lane.↩︎

  2. Similarly, if you actually talk to each other daily, then do you really need retrospectives? And if you actually talk to each other throughoout the day, then do you really need the Daily Standup? Maybe and maybe.↩︎