Pick And Choose Your Spots For Maximum Effort

I absolutely despise the concept of short sprints.

A sprint is a dedicated period in which a set amount of work will be completed on a project, originating from the agile software development methodology. While I have no issues with the concept of time-boxing deliverables, the idea that these time boxes should always be short and intense, like every two weeks, is maddening.

Most of the teams I've been a part of had two-week sprints. Every fortnight, we would have the overhead of retrospective meetings and planning meetings. To have a good planning meeting requires some amount of preparation so that stories can be broken down and preliminary scope can be defined. It felt as if there was a week of overhead each sprint, which meant there was only a week left to do actual work. Most weeks, we missed our mark—the items we planned to deliver always took longer than anticipated, despite our aggressive pacing. Missing the last sprint meant that we lost a bit of urgency when it came to the curre…