Sprint
scrum uses a time box of either one, two, three, or four weeks, with a preference for the shorter ones as they increase learning and innovation power.
teams that finish early accelerate faster—be strict with your time box—do not add a day to ‘wrap up’ any remaining work. It will skew and invalidate any statistical information you have collected, and it will eat away at your next iteration. What is done, is done. No more, no less. Stop fooling not only yourself, but also your stakeholders.
Two subsequent sprints are connected head to tail with the following rituals:
- sprint review meeting to review the product results of the previous sprint;
- sprint planning meeting to plan the user stories of the product for the next sprint;
- sprint retrospective meeting to discover experiments that will accelerate the squad's performance.
Often, these meetings are conducted on a single day, with the sprint review meeting in the morning, and the sprint retrospective meeting and sprint planning meeting in the afternoon. Alternatively, you can wrap them around the weekend, with the closing ceremonies on Friday and the opening ceremony on Monday morning.