What is a Sprint in Scrum?
The Sprint is the main event and “container” in Scrum. The Sprint is a timeboxed iteration of maximum one month in which all the Scrum events occur.
The first event of every sprint is the Sprint Planning. The last event is the Sprint Retrospective. It is important to stress that there is no time in between sprints. A new sprint starts right after the conclusion of the previous sprint.
Can a Sprint be cancelled?
By definition, a sprint stops when the timebox is finished, not earlier or later. There is however an edge case that can end the sprint before the timebox finished. This is when the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete. Since the entire purpose of a sprint is to achieve a pre-defined Sprint Goal, it is possible to cancel a sprint before the timebox finished if the Scrum Team concludes that the current Sprint Goal became obsolete, and they have to adapt.
It is important that in this case the sprint is also cancelled, a new Sprint Goal is defined, and the team plans the new sprint. The Sprint Goal cannot change during the sprint.
Those are the key characteristics of a Sprint in Scrum. You can find more information about the events within a sprint on our overview page of the Scrum Framework.
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