Featuresquad and up

Sprints, ceremonies and story points

What a sprint actually is, what the goal, review and retro are for, and how story points work without pretending to be hours. All of it optional.

By ToDidIt Product TeamUpdated 7 September 2026

What is a sprint?

A fixed block of time, usually one to four weeks, that you plan once and then leave alone. You decide at the start what is going into it, you work through it, and at the end you look at what actually happened before planning the next one.

The fixed length is the whole trick. If the deadline moves, the plan is a wish. If the deadline is fixed and the scope moves, you find out early and honestly how much you actually get through, which is the only number that makes future plans worth anything.

Tip

None of this is required to use Horizon. The Sprint view is a fortnight of days you can drag work around, and it works perfectly well for someone who has never heard the word sprint. Everything below is for teams who want the ceremony.

Where does this come from?

Agile is a reaction to planning a year of work up front and discovering in month eleven that the plan was wrong in month two. Instead of one long plan, you work in short cycles and re-plan at the end of each one, so being wrong costs you a sprint rather than a year.

Scrum is the most common way of doing that, and it is where sprints, story points and the ceremonies come from. ToDidIt implements the parts that survive contact with small teams and leaves out the parts that need a full-time facilitator to run.

What are the goal, review and retro for?

Three notes fields on each sprint, and they answer three different questions.

Goal, written at the start: what is this sprint for? One sentence. It shows as a one-liner even when the block is collapsed, so the thing you are aiming at stays on screen while you work.
Review, written at the end: what did we actually finish? This is about the work, and it is the one people show to someone outside the team.
Retrospective, also at the end: how did the working go? This is about the team rather than the tasks, and it is where you change something for next time.

Tip

The split between Review and Retro is the part people collapse into one, and it is worth keeping. A review that drifts into process complaints stops being a review, and a retro that only lists shipped features never changes anything.

Do notes follow me between sprints?

No. Switching sprints re-seeds all three fields, so each sprint's notes stay attached to the sprint they are about. A retro from three sprints ago is still there when you go back to it.

The block collapses and only saves when something actually changed, so it costs nothing to ignore.

What are story points?

A measure of how big a piece of work is, relative to the other pieces, deliberately not measured in time.

The reason for the indirection is that people are poor at estimating hours and reasonably good at comparing sizes. Asked how long something takes, you answer for a perfect day with no interruptions. Asked whether it is bigger than that other thing you just did, you are usually right.

1 is your smallest real task, the thing you use as a yardstick.
2 and 3 are small, well understood, no surprises expected.
5 and 8 are substantial, and an 8 usually has something you have not thought about yet.
13 and 21 mean you do not really know. That is useful information: it is a signal to break the task down rather than an estimate to plan around.

Why 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21?

Because the gaps get wider as the numbers get bigger, which is exactly how confidence works. The difference between a 1 and a 2 is real and you can feel it. The difference between a 21 and a 22 is imaginary.

A scale with 21 and 22 on it invites an argument that cannot be settled and is not worth having. Jumping straight from 13 to 21 forces the honest answer, which is usually "bigger, and we are guessing".

Watch out

Points are relative to your team and nothing else. They are not hours, they do not convert to hours, and comparing one team's points to another's produces a number that means nothing. The moment points become a productivity target, people inflate them and the estimates stop working.

What is velocity?

How many points you actually completed in a sprint. Track it for three or four sprints and you have a realistic idea of what fits in the next one, which is the entire payoff for estimating at all.

With story points switched on, the Sprint view shows the pair that matters: committed against done. Committed counts everything planned into the sprint, finished or not, so the gap between the two is the honest measure of how the sprint went.

Tip

That count deliberately ignores your filter bar. A velocity figure that changed when you filtered to one project would be describing your filter rather than your sprint.

How do I turn this on?

All of it lives on one card in Settings, Workspaces, managed by owners and admins, and members see the same values read-only.

Sprint length, one to four weeks, so the window matches the cadence your team actually works to.
Sprint start date, which sets when Sprint 1 began and, by its weekday, the day every sprint starts.
Story points on or off. Off by default, and turning it off hides the estimation UI entirely rather than leaving empty fields around.

Tip

Like the phases card beside it, this saves all at once: Save and Reset appear only when something is different, and nothing commits until you press Save.

Do I need any of it?

No. A solo user planning a fortnight needs none of it, and switching story points on for a team of two mostly produces two people guessing at numbers nobody reads.

It earns its place when several people share a backlog and the question "can we get this done by the end of the month" starts needing a real answer rather than an optimistic one.