On that subject, does anybody hate the term “Sprint” as much as I do?
“Sprints” are extremely quick events that last tens of seconds and are done at most once a day, but more often (in competition) a few times a month, or a few times in a day every few months.
You don’t sprint for a full week every week. That’s a marathon, maybe an ultra-marathon.
The theory being that the team rushes to complete the prioritised items. Also in theory if you close all items before end of the sprint, you are free to not work, or work on pet project at your own pace.
Of course middle management hates the idea of others being idle so they asked to squeeze the last part. Efficiency, baby !
Sure, it might seem like a sprint compared to a Waterfall project where it’s a marathon, where there might be months between points where you check in with the plan and try to figure out if the software is ready to ship yet.
I still just object to the word “sprint”. Any job where you’re sprinting over and over, week after week, where that’s the main thing you’re doing, you’re doing something wrong.
What makes it so annoying to me is that a sprint implies putting in maximum effort for a short time. The pace of a sprint is unsustainable over more than a few seconds.
If you say you did “sprints” for over a year… no you didn’t. Either you sprinted for a little bit and then had to walk for a while because you’d used up all your energy. Or, you jogged at a sustainable pace for a year and just called it a sprint.
Oh absolutely. It wasn’t even close to being sparkling chaos, let alone Agile. What we had as ‘sprints’ would be more accurate as Epics. The whole thing was insane but they stuck with the terminology…
On that subject, does anybody hate the term “Sprint” as much as I do?
“Sprints” are extremely quick events that last tens of seconds and are done at most once a day, but more often (in competition) a few times a month, or a few times in a day every few months.
You don’t sprint for a full week every week. That’s a marathon, maybe an ultra-marathon.
The theory being that the team rushes to complete the prioritised items. Also in theory if you close all items before end of the sprint, you are free to not work, or work on pet project at your own pace.
Of course middle management hates the idea of others being idle so they asked to squeeze the last part. Efficiency, baby !
Sure, it might seem like a sprint compared to a Waterfall project where it’s a marathon, where there might be months between points where you check in with the plan and try to figure out if the software is ready to ship yet.
I still just object to the word “sprint”. Any job where you’re sprinting over and over, week after week, where that’s the main thing you’re doing, you’re doing something wrong.
We had a bunch of simultaneous ‘sprints’ that went on for over a year…
What makes it so annoying to me is that a sprint implies putting in maximum effort for a short time. The pace of a sprint is unsustainable over more than a few seconds.
If you say you did “sprints” for over a year… no you didn’t. Either you sprinted for a little bit and then had to walk for a while because you’d used up all your energy. Or, you jogged at a sustainable pace for a year and just called it a sprint.
Oh absolutely. It wasn’t even close to being sparkling chaos, let alone Agile. What we had as ‘sprints’ would be more accurate as Epics. The whole thing was insane but they stuck with the terminology…