Sprints do give faster feedback, early value and autonomy, but only in contrast with planning the complete project upfront in utter detail and committing to a d

Sprints do give faster feedback, early value and autonomy, but only in contrast with planning the complete project upfront in utter detail and committing to a deadline. It's a compromise. Instead of planning a whole project we just do two weeks and go from there. Its a nice idea but it often doesn't pan out in practice. The sprint is way too detailed, the team gives too much time and attention to planning the next two weeks and too little to what comes after, often people don't really know what to do when they finish early or don't make the sprint, etc. But most of all, everything becomes this game of predicting the sprint and finishing it rather than solving the most important business problems right now. It becomes a bureaucratic thing (in a bad sense). For me, two weeks is usually too small of a timeframe to get something really meaningful done, so the sprint goals feels like a collection of random things we stuffed in two weeks. Most people also adhere religiously to the goal of 'achieving the sprint', which pushes the team to planning together in way too much detail. Not achieving the sprint feels like failure and you will get 'punished' if only by disapproval. We should take it as feedback and rejoice in the opportunity to hone our estimation skills, but in reality it functions as a reverse gamification mechanism making devs conservative and risk avoidant. In an ideal situation, what sprints give you is control over delivery schedules. But this control always comes with a price, and two weeks into the future isn't far enough by far. It's never free to set a hard deadline. So you pay with lower productivity in order to get higher control over schedule. I think its better to set looser goals, have a course roadmap of things you will be working on, problems you want to solve, but don't fret over 'velocity' and 'story points', just like you are not counting lines of code produced per day. Story points are meaningless, what matters is if you have solved some problem. That is what gives you autonomy, value and feedback, not 'achieving the sprint'. Nobody cares about that.