[dudul]

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.

[new_hackers]

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?

[neltnerb]

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.

[theptip]

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.

(http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events-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.

[rapala]

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."