What characterizes an agile sprint?

An agile sprint is characterized by being a time-boxed period designed to achieve specific goals or deliverables. Typically lasting between one to four weeks, sprints help teams maintain a consistent rhythm of delivering working software. This time constraint encourages focus and allows teams to effectively manage their workload within a defined timeframe, assessing progress and making adjustments in subsequent sprints based on feedback and lessons learned.

In this framework, the emphasis is on iterative development, where teams can rapidly adapt to changes and continuously improve their product based on stakeholder input. This approach fosters collaboration and allows teams to demonstrate tangible results at the end of each sprint, ensuring alignment with project goals.

The other options do not accurately reflect the nature of an agile sprint. For instance, gathering user requirements is fundamental to the overall agile process but occurs before and during sprints, rather than being the sole focus within a sprint. Additionally, a sprint is by definition a fixed duration, contradicting the idea of it lasting indefinitely. Lastly, while all phases of the software development lifecycle may be touched upon throughout the project, a sprint itself does not encompass all these phases simultaneously; rather, it focuses on specific development tasks, maintaining the agile principle of iterative progress.