What to call a bounded period of work - and whether to have one

Decided: sprint, as docs/sprints/<team>/<slug>.md - a container with its own goal and an agreed end date, several active in parallel, one per team. An intent moved into a sprint leaves the backlog pool and cannot sit in two sprints at once. The artifact was settled in ADR-028; the name in ADR-041.

This entry has already been overturned once, which is the point of it. The first answer was cycle, chosen against sprint on the argument recorded below: borrowing the word borrows the ceremony. It lost to use. Readers stopped at the unfamiliar word and spent their first question asking whether it was a sprint - and the dashboard made the cost visible, since a page built for people who never open the repository had a tab whose label needed a sentence before anything under it could be read. A design argument lost to an observation, which is the only way it should have lost.

The path was the other way round first. docs/teams/<team>/sprints/ reads more naturally if you think team-first, and it lost on one argument: every other folder under docs/ is named for the kind of thing inside it - runbooks/, journeys/, ideas/, research/, discovery/. teams/ would be the first that names an organizational unit instead, and it would immediately invite everything else a team has to live under it. The artifact kind stays the folder; the team is a partition inside it. Worth overturning if a second team turns out to need genuinely per-team configuration rather than just its own files.

The doubt that remains: the borrowed word arrives carrying expectations the standard does not meet. Somebody who knows Scrum will look for points, a velocity commitment and a fixed timebox, and find none of them. That cost is real; it is paid once per reader, in one clause, where cycle charged every reader the same question forever.

Why not the obvious ones

cycle was the pick until 2026-08-07: Linear uses it for almost exactly this, so it was expected to arrive pre-explained to both people and agents, carrying recurrence without implying ceremony. In use it did not - it read as a new word for a thing people already had a word for.
wave is already spoken for: brownfield alignment runs in waves, and a repo where the same word means two different bounded things is exactly the collision this project keeps finding in its own files.
track carries the parallelism well - several teams, several lanes - and loses the time bound and the goal, which are the two things that make the container useful.
iteration is accurate and neutral, and as unfamiliar as cycle was without even Linear's precedent behind it - the same tax for less.

What a better answer would have to do

Name a period that (1) has an owner and a goal, (2) has an end date that is agreed rather than fixed by a framework, (3) can run in parallel with several others under one backlog, and (4) does not smuggle in a methodology. sprint fails (4) on its face and is kept anyway, because ADR-041 denies the methodology explicitly and in one place, and because the word is understood before the sentence explaining it. A candidate that does all four and is recognised on sight would win.

The question underneath the name

Whether the standard should carry work periods at all. The counter-argument is honest: the backlog with a definition of done per item already keeps knowledge alive, and periods are coordination, which is scale-profile territory. It landed as scale-only - a solo repo never meets it.

The argument for is timeline: with periods that carry goals and dates, a skill can read every team's folder and derive when the project actually lands, and a closing skill can record what was finished against what was planned. That turns estimation into arithmetic over the repo's own history rather than a meeting. Without periods there is nothing to derive it from.

Options weighed

sprint (rejected once for ceremony, chosen 2026-08-07 for recognition, with the ceremony denied in the record), cycle (chosen 2026-08-02, overturned by use), wave (collides with the alignment waves), track (loses the time bound), milestone (GitHub already owns the term, and it implies a fixed date rather than an agreed one), iteration (unfamiliar without a precedent to lean on).