Before sprints there was waterfall scheduling at the project level: requirements, design, development, testing, delivery, and maintenance. Often tasks would be

Before sprints there was waterfall scheduling at the project level: requirements, design, development, testing, delivery, and maintenance. Often tasks would be late and delays would propagate resulting in the old adage for estimating how long a software project would take: think of a an amount of time it should take, then to get the actual time, double the number and then change the unit to the next longer time unit.