My employer is big on Scrum-flavored Agile Software Development. This is not a critique of “Agile” practices (if you want one Steve Yegge won’t let you down). I just don’t have enough experience organizing software projects to judge if this whole “Agile” thing is working well or not. But I do think the choice of the word “Sprint” to denote a unit of work is harmful.
A sprint is unsustainable. Fully recovering from a true-sprint takes a long time. To be ready to sprint again, you must rest for far longer then the sprint lasted. And you’re pretty useless (at least running-wise) while you rest. These are simple things that we learned as kids on the playground. This is what “sprint” means to people.
Calling repeated multi-week units of sustainable and quality work a “sprint” makes no sense whatsoever. Worse, it subtly encourages over-exertion and behaviors that are detrimental to a project.
It might be argued that in the context of Scrummy-Agileness, “Sprint” is a technical term, divorced from the common parlance. Whatever. Words don’t change meaning overnight, and they are almost never their own antonyms. Word-choice is known to influence people.
Sure, word-choice alone isn’t enough to derail a project, or sink a methodology. That’s why this isn’t a criticism of “Scrum”, which will ultimately stand or fall for other reasons. But there are plenty of much better terms to describe a chunk of work, that will help long-term productivity. Wouldn’t you rather work for a company that evaluated how effective a “Play” was?