[Scrum Anti-Patterns] Sprint Length and some misunderstandings

Some people asked me about Sprint Length and how to define it. Most of the concern is whether we can do Scrum with a 1-day sprint. Can we do Scrum with a sprint longer than 1 month? So this post will cover this topic.

1-day Sprint

Yes, you can do Scrum with a 1-day sprint. But you need to take into account how all events are held in one day. And does the development team have enough time to deliver working software? Some experiences have shown that when the Scrum length is less than a week, the team tends to remove all events to focus on developing features.

Remember that Scrum is based on transparency, inspection, and adaptation. If the team uses time to build working software but lacks a formal opportunity to inspect and adapt, they will lose the chance to learn and improve.

So if your business really must have a working software release every day, you can do a 1-day sprint, but that is not a recommendation.

Sprint longer one month
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Sprint’s time-box is one month, but Scrum does not stop you to have Sprint longer than one month. If you want to do sprint longer than one month, you need to consider: it will reduce focus, increase complexity & risk, valuable of feedbacks can be lost from stakeholders and market. Of-course, It’s not Scrum.

How to define Sprint length?

You can use some indicators below to define Sprint length:

– Market changes: What are your market conditions, and how fast do they change?
– Level of the team’s maturity.
– The uncertainty of technology.
– How long to have feedback from stakeholders to make sure the team builds the right value first. (if product knowledge is low, the PO doesn’t know what the right value of the product is -> In this case, the solution is: deliver quickly and learn from the market is the top priority)
– Dependency on externals.