What a Sprint Is Why work is cut into fixed rounds, and what each round contains.

A sprint is a fixed stretch of time, usually a week or two, in which a team agrees to finish a specific set of work. Rather than one open-ended list that never ends, work arrives in rounds, each with its own goal and its own close.

That is the whole idea: a shared short-term target, so everybody is pulling in the same direction at once and progress is checkable before the end of the quarter.

What a sprint holds

A goal. One sentence on what this round is for. It answers "why are we doing this now", which a list of tasks never does.

A board. Every issue in the sprint, in whatever arrangement suits the team.

A close. A retro at the end, where what was learned gets written down rather than remembered vaguely.

The rhythm

1. The team agrees a goal and pulls work in from the backlog
2. Work moves across the board as people pick it up
3. Standups keep everyone aligned; velocity shows the pace
4. The sprint closes with a retro before the next one opens

Sprint states

A sprint is in one of three states: planning while it is being assembled, active while it runs, and completed once closed.

Goals are optional. Plenty of sprints run without one, and a sprint with no goal still works as a container. But a goal is what lets somebody outside the team understand the round at a glance, and it is what a retro measures against.