The main goal of a Sprint is to be committed to an amount of work during a certain period of time. As smaller this period is, the less risk of cost and effort. 1

Suppose you choose ten tickets to work on for two weeks. At the end of those two weeks, you finished most of them and ended up nearly without work. So you need a new Spring Planning meeting to choose the next ten tickets, more or less, to work on for the next two weeks.

What if you focused more on the number of work in progress, ten in this example, than on the time window? You could maintain ten tickets on your board, and each time one ticket was finished, you could select the next one to fill this empty spot at the daily meeting. In this case, you wouldn’t need a specific meeting for this purpose because you are choosing only one task to be the next on the board.

Limit Work in Progress (WIP) is one of the practices 2 of the Kanban methodology 3, used to improve what and how you already do things.

Is the ditch of fixed length Sprints and focus on WIP limit fitted to you? Well, as Kanban says: improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally. Design safe-to-fail experiments so that if your hypothesis is correct and the experiment gives good results, keep the change, but if the results are not positive, you can easily roll back to the prior state 2.

  1. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#the-sprint ↩︎

  2. https://kanban.university/kanban-guide/#principles-practices ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. https://kanban.university/kanban-guide/#kanban-method ↩︎