Why is the 4 week sprint still the literary default?

I’ve been wondering for a long time why the 4 week sprint still seems to be the default in Scrum literature. Even the State of Scrum Report states there is a 38% majority using 2 week sprint while 29% use 3-4 week sprints (page 25). Given that 3 and 4 week sprints have been merged in the statistics implies that the actual percentage amount of teams using 4 week sprints is even lower than 29%. Yet in the same report insight #2 states that “a Sprint is one iteration of a month or less that is of consistent length throughout a development effort.” completely ignoring its own results (page 38). Also, why isn’t the book “Software in 30 days”, released in 2012, called “Software in 14 days”?

Part of Scrum and agile in general is to generate feedback as quickly and often as possible, using 30 day sprints you spend a whole lot of time between two feedback cycles. In addition 4 weeks of time is so much that it’s really hard to look back at them when sitting in a retrospective. Can Scrum literature please inspect & adapt and use the 2 week sprint as the new default?

Sprint Burndown Chart: Yes or no?

I don't believe in sprint burndown charts. So far, in every team I've been Scrum Master for, not one developer really wanted to update the burndown by himself, meaning I was either the burndown-monkey or I found myself asking the team to update the burndown regularly. And since I don't get the real advantages of burndown charts, I struggle to explain the team why it's important to maintain the burndown chart. I guess that's what you call a chicken/egg-problem.

The burndown chart is supposed to show the current status of the team and indicates whether the team is likely to successfully get everything done in the sprint. But: In my opinion you don't need a burndown for that because all the information can be read from the sprintboard. Nowadays sprints are mostly 2 weeks long (I haven't heard from anyone using longer sprints than that in a long time), so it's relatively easy to overlook this time. While I think that a burndown is useful with 4 week long sprints, in sprints up to 2 weeks length it's basically just maintaining an information that is already on the sprintboard.

I've been trying to solve this dilemma for quite some time now but haven't found a real solution yet. First I tried to find the reasons for a burndown chart. Having found none that did satisfy me, I thought: Well, maybe there's another good, intuitive way to visualize the current status. One that would maybe integrate directly into the sprintboard. So far, I haven't found one.

Being on agile coach camp 2013 past weekend, I took the chance and conducted a session called "Burndown Chart 2.0" hoping to find this intuitive, sprintboard-integrated way.

Although we haven't found one, the session has helped me a lot to remind myself what the burndown chart is about, whom it is for and whether it is useful or not. First of all the burndown chart is a tool by the team for the team and no one else, no manager, no stakeholder, no one else. Second its main purpose is transparency: Transparency where we are, transparency what has happened.

Deriving from the fact that it's a tool by the team for the team, the burndown chart should be used when the team wants to use it. If you feel that a burndown chart could help you in your current situation, then use it, otherwise there's probably no real reason to use it. Using a burndown chart is not essential.

Apart from that it doesn't always have to be a chart. Depending on what you want to visualize it can also be a traffic light (visualizing if the team thinks the sprint will be successfull) or any other visualization you can think of.

Who's doing what?

When using Scrum Sprintboards or Kanban Boards you usually also want to show who's currently doing what.
We started with pinboards, pins and index cards. In order to visualize who was doing what we printed out a photo of every team member and pinned the photo to the current index card that was in the "Work in progress" (Wip) column.


A while ago we changed this system: We bought a large whiteboard and started using magnets instead of pins. This gave us the chance to print magnets for each team member thus you simply have to put a magnet on the Wip index card to visualize that you're working on it:

As you can see, we didn't use actual photos but gave every team member the opportunity to choose a picture of their liking. I chose Dr. Zoidberg. If you choose to do so aswell, don't forget to include a legend on your whiteboard so that everyone can see which magnet belongs to whom.

Every team member has 10 magnets, which makes it really easy to still know who completed what since the last standup, as we keep the magnets on the index card until the next standup.

You can order the magnets here.