The word "Sprint" in agile development: An unfortunate misnomer
The other day David Whitney made an interesting comment about the word "Sprint":
I kind of rue the day scrum normalised the term "sprint" for the connotations it carries.
It made me realize that I always found the term Sprint highly misleading. In fact, when I first learned about agile software development, I thought that a Sprint is something you do when you struggle to meet a deadline and you scramble to deliver something to your stakeholders. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, the official Scrum Glossary writes: "Sprints are done consecutively, without intermediate gaps".
Have you ever sprinted consecutively many times in a row, without intermediate gaps? Sounds like hell. Actually, a Sprint kind of sounds like the opposite of what it describes, which is a steady run of work, repeated week after week. On Mastodon I proposed the term "Lap", as in a lap of a marathon. This seems to fit the meaning much better – at least one can imagine running many laps in a row.
But all of this made me curious about the origin of the word. "Sprints" were apparently coined by Jeff Sutherland, who writes :
And so my team embarked on what we called "Sprints". We called them that because the name evoked a quality of intensity. We were going to work all out for a short period of time and then stop to see where we were.
Jeff Sutherland in Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Looking back, I guess this makes sense if you consider Sprint reviews and retrospectives apart from the Sprint itself. Nowadays most people work in a way where those things are seen as part of the Sprint, which only ends once the next one starts.
And so our Sprints have become never ending, an ongoing toil with no respite...
An abstract painting interpreting the word Sprint in agile development
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Feel free to email me at vincent.rolfs@gmail.com. Or you can follow me on Mastodon at @vincentrolfs@hachyderm.io.