Glossary · Product and planning
What is a sprint?
A sprint is a fixed, short period, usually one to four weeks, in which a team commits to finishing a chosen set of work. It starts with planning, ends with a review of what was delivered and a retrospective on how the team worked, and the next sprint starts immediately after. Sprints come from Scrum.
Also called: Iteration, cycle
Sprint, explained
The Scrum Guide defines sprints as fixed-length events of one month or less, where all the work to reach a sprint goal happens. Fixing the length is the point: a regular rhythm forces the team to break work into pieces small enough to finish, to show working results often, and to adjust based on what they learn.
A sprint has four events. Sprint planning picks a goal and the backlog items that serve it, forming the sprint backlog. The daily scrum is a short daily check on progress toward the goal. The sprint review shows what was done to stakeholders and gathers feedback. The retrospective looks at how the team worked and picks something to improve. Some tools call sprints cycles or iterations and drop some of the ceremony.
Sprints help when a team needs a steady cadence and protection from constant re-prioritisation: once the sprint starts, its scope is meant to stay stable. They fit less well with work that arrives unpredictably, such as support or operations, where a continuous flow with work-in-progress limits, the Kanban approach, often suits better. Many small teams use neither formally and plan week by week.
Velocity, the amount of work a team typically finishes per sprint, is often tracked to help planning. It is useful for the team itself and misleading when compared across teams.
For example, a team runs two-week sprints. On Monday they pick the goal "customers can pay by card" and seven backlog items. They meet for ten minutes each morning. On the second Friday they demo card payments to the founder, and in the retrospective agree to write acceptance criteria before work starts.
How it works in Atrix
Atrix calls sprints cycles. Each product can run cycles of one to four weeks with a goal; you plan issues into a cycle from the backlog, watch progress and a burndown of open issues, and when you complete it, unfinished work rolls over to the next cycle or back to the backlog. Atrix does not track story points or velocity, so the burndown counts issues rather than estimates.
Read next
Related terms
- BacklogA backlog is the ordered list of work a team might do but has not yet committed to: features, fixes, improvements and ideas.
- Product roadmapA product roadmap is a plan that shows where the major pieces of work sit over the coming months or quarters, and the dates other people depend on.
- OKR (objectives and key results)OKRs, objectives and key results, are a goal-setting method.
- PRD (product requirements document)A PRD, or product requirements document, describes what a product or feature must do and why, written before it is built.