Where I work there has been a lot of movement towards creating an agile development environment. I believe that the process of transitioning into agile is unique for each company or group that makes that commitment. Something that I noticed, which isn’t really unique in the agile world, is that short sprints have a lot of advantages. I realize that there are a lot of projects/bugs/features that may require sprints longer than one week, but I think a push to shorten sprints could be advantageous in developing quality.
Iterate!
(Not to be confused with irritate…)
In software development there is a lot of emphasis on iteration. Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!
Iterating on a project is one of the aspects that allows agile to work so well. So in the beginning we tried 4 week iterations, thinking that longer sprints would ease the transition from our previous development process, which was a scrum hybrid environment, and already in a 4 week cycle. What we discovered after about two iterations(two months) was that these longer iterations didn’t seem to be working as well as we had hoped. They seemed to help with the transition somewhat, but as time went on a lot of us wanted to switch to the shorter sprint. One reason was that we realized that a lot can happen in four weeks when it comes to requirements, direction guided by business needs and critical defects. So in our particular case the biggest advantage to one week sprints was the tremendous increase in…
