1 Experiment That Will Change How You Use Scrum

I’ve tried every flavor and tweak on the Scrum Framework.

• By-the-book
• ScrumBut(tm)
• ScumBan
• Etc

But there’s one experiment that changed how I ran my Scrum Teams.

A full day of one-hour sprints

I first tried one hour sprints during a hack-a-thon.

We had about a day to build and ship a working app. And we knew that in order to have a chance at winning, it had to actually work. So we decided the best approach was to work in very small batches.

And it worked because we were one of the few teams who finished.

Anatomy of a one-hour sprint

Here’s the format we used:

• 15 minutes of planning
• 40 minutes of building
• 5 minutes for retrospective

The extremely limited time-box exposed so many faults. But we were able to cut out the waste and focus on shipping.

Give one-hour sprints a shot, you'll be surprised what you find!