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Vinicius Melo
Vinicius Melo

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What's the ideal number of weeks in an agile sprint?

Hello everyone,

So, what's a good length of Agile Sprint in terms of weeks? Since we are working in small projects, we are trying to use 1 week, but this seems to fast. What do you think?

I am developing small projects like Memocards and Stackfolio , they are quite simple, but since our sprints are too short, it seems we are focusing too much in small details instead of doing a major improvement.

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Avalander • Edited

The ideal length depends on the situation. If you can't finish important work in a week you have basically two options:

  1. Try to split the major improvements into smaller, incremental changes.
  2. Try 2-week long sprints.

Whatever you do, you will need to evaluate whether it solved the problem. A good way to do that is define your process changes as experiments and answer the following questions:

  • What is our current situation?
  • What is our target situation?
  • What are we going to try next?

And when you've had some time to try the changes, go through those questions again and check if the new current situation is closer to the target situation than the previous current situation. Then you can define a new next step to get even closer to the target situation.

Just to reiterate, there's no ideal length, it depends on your specific context. What works for another team might not work for your team, and what works for your team now might not work anymore after six months. Hence the need to review and adapt your process periodically.