[vannevar]

Thanks, interesting perspective. The advantage of sprints is that you're demoing progress on a regular basis. I can see the possibility of people focusing more on the demo than the ultimate purpose of the code, in which case as you say you'd accumulate technical debt in the form of hacks. But if you don't demo regularly, you run the risk of hidden problems where everyone assumes something works when in fact it doesn't. Either way, competent management is needed to avoid the pitfall.

[spronkey]

The 'hack a demo' problem highlights one of the rationales behind having a Definition of Done in Scrum. Unfortunately Scrum doesn't put hard and fast rules behind what should be in it, but most good Scrum teams take principles from XP such as all code should be tested. This helps reduce the 'hack' factor at the expense of getting it out the door faster.