Sprint

A sprint is a fixed period — usually two weeks — in which an agreed set of work is completed to a finished state. The length is fixed and the scope is what varies; that is the mechanism, and reversing it removes the point.

The end of a sprint should produce something demonstrable. Not necessarily released, but real enough that a stakeholder can look at it and disagree with it, which is where most of the value lies. A sprint whose output can only be described in a status report has not closed the feedback loop it exists to close.

The word misleads. A sprint is a unit of planning, not an instruction to hurry, and a team that treats every sprint as a sprint in the athletic sense produces the technical debt that slows the next ten.