Key Principle: Keep Sprints Short

A corollary to keeping projects small is keeping sprints short. You might think that the small project is good enough on its own. But short sprints of 1–3 weeks support successful projects in numerous ways, as described in the next few sections.

Short sprints reduce midstream requirements and increase responsiveness to new requirements

In Scrum, new requirements are allowed to be added between sprints. Once a sprint has started, requirements cannot be added until the next sprint. This is reasonable when sprints are only 1–3 weeks long.

If development cycles are longer, the pressure to add requirements increases, and it becomes less reasonable to ask stakeholders to defer their requirements requests. If a Sequential development cycle is 6 months long, asking a stakeholder to delay implementation of their new requirement until the next cycle means holding it until the beginning of the next cycle, adding it at that point, and then waiting for delivery until the end of the next cycle. That would be an average of 1.5 cycles or 9 months.