I don't know if this is meant to be facetious, but I actually fully agree. "Sprint" is a terrible analogy because in reality it is impossible to be sprinting all the time. I usually just say "iteration".
I like "sprint" because it sounds energetic, but the reality of two week sprints is more like interval training. Sort of like this:
Days 1-3: Walking, talking, and enjoying life.
Days 4-7: Jogging. You climb some minor hills and get a little out of breath, but life is still good. You've got this.
Day 8: Big hill day! You eat an energy gel and start on up. You expect to be exhausted at the top, but you'll have two more days to relax a bit afterward.
Day 9: Dark night of the soul. You ran all night but got lost in the night. You're way off course, further down the hill, and the entire hillside is on fire. It's all you can do to just find the course again.
Day 10: Intent on staying on course, you slowly slog on up. You get burned a bit from the raging fires around you. Life sucks. The job sucks.
Day 10+1: You aren't quite sure how or when you agreed to this, but your Saturday is shot as you try to climb up the final stretch.
Day 10+2: You're there! Everyone else is there and you're all exhausted, but proud of your accomplishment. Sure your Sunday was shot, but it's a one time thing. You tell yourself you'll never over commit again.
Let's say you do 2 week sprints as part of your process. You do a sprint, finish it, and then do another sprint immediately after. How is that viable? Effectively it means that you never stop sprinting. I don't think it's sustainable.
Agreed. I wonder if any manager would ever put in "walks", or "cool downs" into the schedule. Meaning allocate a week (or some time span) in between each sprint to do all those things you wish you had time to do in the sprint.
I know a "walk" is yet just another physical analogy for a software production process (which the analogies don't always work), but maybe it is more of a cultural mindset to value longterm team health without it becoming just a "slacking" week?
Is that actually what scrum suggests sprints are? Thanks, I missed that, that's silly if so. I assumed by the name that this was like a one week a month kind of thing.
I think there's quite a lot of getting hung up on the word itself here... According to the Scrum guide, a sprint is just:
> a time-box of one month or less during which a "Done", useable, and potentially releasable product Increment is created. Sprints have consistent durations throughout a development effort. A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint.
There's nothing that says you need to "sprint" through your sprints, quite the contrary it's supposed to be a way of measuring your team's steady-state output by making the feedback loop short.
If people are really hearing the word "sprint" and thinking "ah, Scum is telling me to work at 110% all the time without stopping", then I put forth that no methodology or change of terminology is going to save them from themselves. However, I suspect there's something about the timebox structure that makes short-term thinking the default unless discipline is applied, and discipline is hard.
Exactly. The point of time boxing is that you have to stop and reflect on the time spent. It gives you the chance to switch tasks if priorities have changed or to split the current task.
Or to go on to the next sprint with the same task. But here lies the problem in many cases. The sprint is taken not as a time box but as a deadline. A sprint should meen: "You can work 2 weeks, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day on this. Then you stop to think."
Days 1-3: Walking, talking, and enjoying life.
Days 4-7: Jogging. You climb some minor hills and get a little out of breath, but life is still good. You've got this.
Day 8: Big hill day! You eat an energy gel and start on up. You expect to be exhausted at the top, but you'll have two more days to relax a bit afterward.
Day 9: Dark night of the soul. You ran all night but got lost in the night. You're way off course, further down the hill, and the entire hillside is on fire. It's all you can do to just find the course again.
Day 10: Intent on staying on course, you slowly slog on up. You get burned a bit from the raging fires around you. Life sucks. The job sucks.
Day 10+1: You aren't quite sure how or when you agreed to this, but your Saturday is shot as you try to climb up the final stretch.
Day 10+2: You're there! Everyone else is there and you're all exhausted, but proud of your accomplishment. Sure your Sunday was shot, but it's a one time thing. You tell yourself you'll never over commit again.
....
Days 1-3: Walking, talking, and enjoying life....