While working on Storia.me iPhone app, we’ve eventually came up to the three-week sprints. Empirically, they proved themselves to make product high quality and provided time to get moderate functionality chunks done. Two notes here:

• First of all – this is does not include time for appStore approval. That’s additional week. So a release cycle is 1 month.
• Second, we came to three-week sprints after we released MVP.  Preparing the app for MVP was quite a kerfuffle, but we managed to finish needed bits in 2 months. Don’t forget to have some rest and go for a holiday after that 🙂

Time Distribution during 3 week sprint

2 weeks for development, 1 week for testing and fixing. Essential part of undistracted 2 weeks development, is to provide fully described User Stories with corner cases explained  before the sprint. You also have to estimate all of the workload, and make sure it fits into the sprint. Leave tickets of a less priority on top of the backlog. Pay unprecedented attention to details, so that developer doesn’t need to waste time on communication and clarification (which always results in delays) how the described feature should work.

There are often times when stakeholders rush with some new request. For 80% of the time you’re (a good manager) able to protect developer and stories from scope creeps, but sometimes you are not able to do so. And here comes the last week of the sprint, that mostly handles such unfortunate situations.

Make sure that AppStore materials are ready one week before app submission. Screenshots for all resolutions and languages, descriptions for different markets, no legacy and unsupported SDKs.

Key point here is to make comfortable pace for the developer, so that as less things as possible distract him during the sprint. You know the rule: less distractions => more productivity.

And final achievement is predictable stable timely releases. These are something that are valued by stakeholders, investors, team and users.