Three ways of planning

 

Note: This is a rewrite of my earlier post "The challenge with "release every sprint"" which I have deleted. It wasn't well written and after a considerable amount of Linkedin conversations I rewrote it to this.

From the Scrum guide "Sprint Planning initiates the Sprint by laying out the work to be performed for the Sprint." Within this, there are three ways of planning a sprint. 

1) Early Scrum had a team plan for a release at the end of the sprint. 
2) More recently, teams plan for what will be released by the end of the sprint while intending to release incrementally during the middle of the sprint. 
3) It's possible to do a third kind of planning - a secession of releases starting from the beginning of the sprint and continuing until the end of the sprint.

#1 is still the most common type of planning. #2 is better, but still has one focus on the big batch of the sprint. Sprint lengths don't usually exactly correlates with when something can be released. #3 is the best, but requires a concept of what the smallest releasable chunk of value is (like an MBI in DA or MOVE in tameflow - not the same as an MVP). It also has one build in small sections and pivot each time. There is no tendancy to get stuck with the sprint plan, but pivoting occurs with every interim release.

#3 disengages releases from the sprints altogether. This is essentially a flow model. While sprints may be useful as training wheels, there is overhead with them.