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  • Yes, sprints/iterations needs to be back to back, but your team and management should consider the length of the project and build in some less stressful times. Sometimes these are called discovery sprints. This helps the team from not getting burned out. Make sure everyone understands the entirety of the project is not a sprint but a marathon. Commented Oct 23, 2018 at 14:12
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    The word "sprint" in scrum is not intended in the sense of a "short race at top speed". It is simply the term used to refer to a timebox of work. Commented Oct 23, 2018 at 15:27
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    I guess it's better to think about that as a "race short enough that the whole track and the finish are visible from the very start and at all times" (as opposed to a long race with possible hard-to-foresee obstacles). This "race at top speed" connotation seems actually pretty harmful here. Commented Oct 23, 2018 at 16:31
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    @JacobRaihle I disagree with you. Somebody came up with the term and had a purpose for it. A time box? Indeed. But maybe they coined it a sprint because that's exactly what it was, a small box of time meant for the team to sprint to the "sprint" goal, which should be some deliverable. Although I'm not the source of truth, i tend to disagree that it was termed a "sprint" just for it to mean a time box. When my teams work in a sprint, we go hard. We do everything we can to meet the sprint goal. At the end of one, we are often gassed. But we always deliver. Commented Oct 23, 2018 at 17:42
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    And to my previous comment -- i think this is precisely what is wrong with the common idea of a "sprint" today -- that it's just a timebox of sorts. If we think about it like that, then yeah, sure, everything including tech debt just falls into a "sprint". It just doesn't make sense. I could see you doing a few back-to-back sprints to build a product. But once the core product is done, and you're doing maintenance, paying down tech-debt, etc, its a whole different ballpark.. Just my opinion Commented Oct 23, 2018 at 17:48