Gaps Between Sprints In Scrum

Apparently we’ve been running Type A Scrum as defined by Jeff Sutherland in a paper from Agile 2005. He’s divided Scrum into 3 types:

  • Type A Scrum – Everything is done in the Sprint, but there is downtime of a week or two between each Sprint.
  • Type B Scrum – You start to overlap the product backlog definition for the next Sprint into each Sprint resulting in no real downtime between Sprints.
  • Type C Scrum – Jeff Sutherland’s nirvana where you have overlapping Sprints.

Our experience so far is that we have been running Type A Scrum with gaps between each Sprint. I’ve had a lingering question over whether this was supposed to happen which this paper helps answer. Since we’re in early adoption and getting everyone up to speed this is pretty much expected, but it will be nice if we can evolve into a Type B Scrum without the time between Sprints.