Agile Sprint

What is an agile sprint?

An agile sprint is a short period with a concentrated effort to complete certain predetermined goals, with those goals often taking the form of a new, changed, or removed feature within the product being developed. Sprints are a common way of managing time in agile product development.

In agile development, a sprint is usually marked by time-boxed iterations of development and experimentation. The goal of an iteration may involve designing and prototyping, coding/programming, testing, recognizing bugs to address, and refactoring code for better performance or security. While a sprint may be a very short period of time, it’s often a small number of days or weeks.

What are the benefits of using agile sprints?

Agile practitioners recognize that building quality products takes time – but they also believe that it should never be at the expense of progress because waiting for leads to a net loss over the course of a project’s life.

Short, regular intervals of work result in increased overall productivity.
Benefits include being more time efficient, changing up how projects are executed, and potentially the most important part – getting customers engaged and involved by having them talk to everyone on each team. In a workshop setting – these short sprints help get individuals who usually collaborate together as well as those who rarely interact with one another collaborating.

Another benefit is the short feedback loops. Completing a small piece of work in a short period of time allows it to be reviewed and feedback provided, ensuring the direction of the change is correct.

Agile sprints have been a huge success for the software development process, as it provides a fail-safe in the event of bugs or mistakes creeping up in development (also known as scope creep).

Using an agile sprint allows developers more time to debug issues from one phase before moving on to another stage of testing without any fear of slowing down progress on other parts of their project.

Sprints are a key component of agile product development, particularly in in the scrum or kanban methodologies.

How are agile sprints managed?

Sprints are usually managed via a series of agile ceremonies. These are usually known as sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

Sprint planning is a meeting in the agile development process in which the product team proposes a list of tasks to take on and complete within the upcoming time-boxed sprint. This usually takes place just prior to the sprint’s start.

The sprint review is a meeting where the team shares details on the work that has been completed in the sprint, with a view to getting that work accepted for release. It usually takes place at the end of the sprint.

The sprint retrospective is a meeting where the product reflects on the previous sprint and identifies ways in which future sprints could be improved. The improvements identified are often process-related, but could also be related to potential improvements in the product itself. The sprint retrospective usually takes place at the end of, or sometimes just after the sprint ends.