The complete guide to Scrum sprints

Despite what it sounds like, a Scrum sprint has nothing to do with either rugby or track and field.

A Scrum sprint actually describes the amount of work a development team — or any other team for that matter — will complete over a given amount of time, whether that’s one week or more.

In this guide, we’ll provide key information on how Scrum sprints enable teams to continuously improve their work throughout the sprint cycle and how you can use them to achieve your sprint goals efficiently with monday dev.

What is a Scrum sprint?

A Scrum sprint is a time-boxed event within the Scrum framework, typically lasting one to four weeks. During the sprint, your Scrum team focuses on delivering a specific set of features or a product increment — often an updated, improved version of your product or software — referred to as the sprint goal.

How long is a Scrum sprint?

The duration of a sprint can range from one to four weeks, with the Scrum Guide emphasizing that sprints should not exceed one month.

Most teams favor a two-week sprint as it strikes a balance between providing enough time to accomplish meaningful work while allowing for frequent feedback and adaptation. Longer sprints of three to four weeks may introduce complexities and risks if the project scope changes during that time.

Given that the average length of a complete project is 11.6 weeks and the average sprint is 2.4 weeks, the average Scrum project lasts for 4.8 sprints.

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How many sprints are there in a Scrum?

Depending on the scale of your project and what you determine as a team during goal setting — including sprint planning — the number of sprints can vary widely from as few as two to three to as many as 10–20 or even more depending on several factors:

• Project scope and complexity: Larger, more complex projects typically require more sprints.
• Sprint length: Shorter sprints (1-2 weeks) may result in more sprints for a given project than longer sprints (3-4 weeks).
• Team velocity: How quickly the team can complete work affects the number of sprints needed.
• Project duration: Longer projects will naturally have more sprints than shorter ones.

There’s no way to give a universal number here.

What are the benefits of a Scrum sprint?

Taking all those factors into account, you can see a Scrum sprint:

• Enables predictability by ensuring regular inspection and adaptation
• Limits risk to a smaller time frame
• Promotes learning cycles and continuous improvement
• Encourages teamwork and focus on a common goal

What is a sprint in Agile, and how does it relate to Scrum?

Scrum is a framework based on the Agile project management methodology, which uses an incremental, iterative approach to deliver project releases throughout its life cycle. Agile planners define a release as creating or substantially updating a product.

Each release is broken down into several iterations called sprints. Each sprint has a fixed length, typically two weeks, and the team has a predefined list of items, or user stories, to work through in each sprint.

Since Scrum is based on the Agile methodology, the two have overlapping similarities, including sprints to deliver predefined work. Even in the greater context of Agile, a sprint often refers to a Scrum sprint because 61% of Agile companies use the Scrum framework. Although iterative cycles are critical to the Agile methodology, not all frameworks call them sprints — some simply refer to them as iterations.

The basics of Scrum (Why is it called Scrum?)

Scrum is named after a rugby term, which signifies a formation where players work closely together to move the ball forward. This metaphor reflects the collaborative and iterative nature of the Scrum framework, emphasizing teamwork and collective effort in tackling complex projects.

Historical context

The term “Scrum” was introduced in 1986 by management experts Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi in their paper on product development. They used it to describe a new approach to managing complex work that emphasized cross-functional teams and iterative progress.

In 1995, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber formalized the Scrum framework, which has since become one of the most widely adopted Agile methodologies. The name encapsulates the essence of the framework, which is about teams working together to achieve common goals while adapting to changing requirements and delivering value incrementally.

Key characteristics of Scrum

• Collaboration: Just as players in a rugby scrum must work closely together, Scrum emphasizes teamwork among cross-functional team members.
• Iterative process: Scrum employs short cycles (sprints) to continuously improve and adapt, similar to how a rugby team adjusts its strategy during a game.
• Focus on value delivery: Scrum aims to deliver a potentially shippable product increment at the end of each sprint, ensuring that the team consistently moves forward.

By drawing on the principles of collaboration and iterative progress, Scrum provides a structured yet flexible framework for managing complex projects, making it a popular choice in various industries beyond software development.

What are the 6 Scrum principles?

The six Scrum principles form the core guidelines for applying the Scrum framework effectively. Scrum implementation in any organization or project requires these non-negotiables.

1. Empirical process control: Emphasizes making decisions based on observation and experimentation rather than detailed upfront planning. (based on transparency, inspection, and adaptation),
2. Self-organization: Encourages team members to manage their own work, fostering creativity, innovation, and shared ownership.
3. Collaboration: Focuses on awareness, articulation, and appropriation. It views project management as a shared value-creation process that relies on team interaction.
4. Value-based prioritization: Organizes and prioritizes tasks based on their importance and value to both end-users and company goals.
5. Time-boxing: Designates specific timings for different activities, such as sprints, sprint planning meetings, daily stand-ups, and sprint reviews.
6. Iterative development: Acknowledges that project requirements evolve and change, emphasizing the need for constant adjustment and revision to better meet customer needs.

What are the 5 stages of Scrum?

The five stages or phases of Scrum are typically described as follows:

1. Initiation
2. Planning and estimation
3. Implementation
4. Review and retrospective
5. Release

These stages provide a general framework. However, Scrum is an iterative process, so the planning, implementation, and review phases often cycle repeatedly in sprints until the project is complete.

Here’s a breakdown of what each stage involves:

1. Initiation phase

• Creating the project vision
• Identifying the Scrum Master, stakeholders, and forming the Scrum team
• Developing epics and creating a prioritized product backlog

2. Planning and estimation phase

• Creating user stories
• Approving, estimating, and committing to user stories
• Creating and estimating tasks
• Developing the sprint backlog

3. Implementation phase

• Creating deliverables
• Conducting daily stand-up meetings
• Updating the prioritized product backlog

4. Review and retrospective phase

• Assessing progress in sprint review meetings
• Reflecting on the process and identifying improvements in sprint retrospectives
• Updating the product backlog

5. Release phase

• Delivering the final project deliverables to stakeholders
• Conducting a project retrospective to gather lessons learned for future projects

What is the goal of a Scrum sprint?

A Scrum sprint aims to deliver a shippable product increment that provides value to stakeholders. This deliverable is encapsulated in the Sprint Goal — a concise statement that defines the primary objective for the sprint. Here are the key aspects of a sprint goal:

• Single objective: The sprint goal represents one clear, focused objective for the sprint.
• Commitment: It serves as a commitment by the developers, providing direction while allowing flexibility in accomplishing the work.
• Created collaboratively: The Scrum team develops the sprint goal during sprint planning.
• Provides purpose: It establishes the “why” of the sprint, giving meaning and motivation to the team’s work.
• Promotes cohesion: The sprint goal encourages the team to work together rather than on separate initiatives.
• Guides decision-making: Throughout the sprint, the goal helps the team prioritize and adapt their work.
• Measurable: A specific practical sprint goal allows the team to assess progress.
• Communicates value: It should articulate why the sprint is worthwhile to the team, company, and customers.
• Flexible scope: While the sprint goal remains fixed, the team can negotiate the exact work needed to achieve it.
• Visible: The sprint goal should be prominently displayed to keep the team focused.

A well-crafted sprint goal provides direction, fosters team collaboration, and helps maintain focus on delivering value throughout the sprint.

What are the 4 stages of a Scrum sprint?

A typical Scrum sprint involves several stages and a series of meetings:

1. Planning

The Scrum team holds a sprint planning meeting to review the product backlog, create the sprint backlog (all the user stories, bugs, or features you want to target in the sprint), and set the sprint goal — i.e. determine how the items in your sprint backlog will change your current product version.

2. Execution

The Scrum team works on the selected tasks from the sprint backlog to complete an increment. They hold daily stand-up meetings (Daily Scrums) to synchronize efforts, address any obstacles, and ensure everyone is aligned on the day’s tasks.

3. Review

At the end of the sprint, the Scrum team holds a sprint review meeting with stakeholders to demonstrate the completed work and gather feedback. If the work is accepted, it’s marked as done. If the stakeholders have valid complaints, the feedback is added to the product backlog, which gets reviewed and prioritized during the next sprint planning session.

4. Retrospective

The Scrum team holds a sprint retrospective meeting to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and what could be improved. The team also considers the project’s direction and whether changing priorities need to be reflected in the product backlog.

What to do before your first Scrum sprint

Before you begin your first Scrum sprint, there are a few steps you should take.

1. Internalize the Scrum values as a team

Don’t try to run before you can walk. Start by establishing a proper team that will internalize the five values and master the three pillars of Scrum so they can take charge and self-organize successfully.

Teams with a better understanding of the values will have fewer issues. They won’t look for or need a leader to take charge. For instance, they may choose not to use a Scrum Master.

2. Create a product roadmap

The product owner should work with stakeholders to establish a product roadmap with high-level goals, priorities, and a flexible timeline. You can use a Gantt chart to visualize it all:

Note that a major component of Agile methodology is adaptation. You can adapt your roadmap as the project progresses, so it doesn’t need to be complete or perfect right off the bat.

3. Collaborate with stakeholders on the product backlog

The product owner and development team should collaborate with stakeholders to add, review, and prioritize product backlog items. Working with clients, internal users, and other stakeholders is the only way to determine the most important features.

4. Plan a realistic increment based on your team’s capacity

Some teams think a sprint is a magic tool to help them get more done in a shorter period of time. But a sprint is only effective when you set achievable goals and keep your focus narrow. The Scrum team should evaluate their own capacity first and plan accordingly.

Many R&D teams use story points (SP), a flexible unit for estimating the effort required for a work item. They consider one SP to be roughly equivalent to a single workday. So, for each two-week sprint, they plan “only” 8 SPs, giving them plenty of time to overcome any roadblocks.

Manage your Scrum sprints more efficiently with monday dev

Within the Scrum framework, a sprint is a great way for Agile teams to quickly build products, one iteration at a time. And with monday dev, built on the robust monday.com Work OS, you have the perfect platform to run your Scrum sprints from start to finish.

Now, you can manage the lifecycle of your Scrum sprints — from planning and execution to review and retrospective — using some Scrum boards and automation recipes to keep you on track.