If the only agile framework you have been exposed to is Scrum, you could be forgiven for thinking that to be agile you must organize your work into sprints.
After all, agile delivery is incremental and iterative and a sprint is just a short iteration, right?
Splitting your project into a number of sprints is one way to deliver in an agile manner but not the only way. For agile thought leaders like Joshua Kerievsky (Modern Agile), sprints are training wheels on the journey to learn how to be agile – they can help, but you might learn to ride much quicker by using a balance bike.
So what’s the alternative?
Rather than have a fixed cadence for conducting agile ceremonies and batching delivery of value into sprints, teams can adopt a continuous flow model of delivery. This is similar to the way most fast food places work. They have a backlog of work items (i.e. food orders) which are prioritized (i.e. first come, first served) and as capacity frees up in the team they grab the next highest priority work item, complete it, and deliver it to a hungry customer.
While such teams might still benefit from ceremonies such as retrospectives or stand ups, they perform them in a just-in-time/just-as-needed manner.
Such a delivery approach avoids the artificial overhead of sprinting but does require a team to be disciplined. As such, it is usually not recommended for teams who are new to agile and that lack coaching support.
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