{"id":125,"date":"2008-09-06T18:18:20","date_gmt":"2008-09-06T23:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/06\/the-term-sprint-is-very-wrong-for-software-projects\/"},"modified":"2009-06-04T02:11:32","modified_gmt":"2009-06-04T07:11:32","slug":"the-term-sprint-is-very-wrong-for-software-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/06\/the-term-sprint-is-very-wrong-for-software-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"The Term “Sprint” is Very Wrong for Software Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

My employer<\/a> is big on Scrum<\/a>-flavored Agile Software Development. This is not a critique of “Agile” practices (if you want one Steve Yegge won’t let you down<\/a>). 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Calling repeated multi-week units of sustainable and quality<\/em> work a “sprint” makes no sense whatsoever. Worse, it subtly encourages over-exertion and behaviors that are detrimental to a project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> their own antonyms. Word-choice is known to influence people.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> terms to describe a chunk of work, that will help<\/em> long-term productivity. Wouldn’t you rather work for a company that evaluated how effective a “Play” was?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[170,435,40,171,169],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","tag-diction","tag-project-management","tag-psychology","tag-scrum","tag-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}