Time Between Sprints

You need to rest between sprints. If you always sprint, you are in effect just jogging. The same in Scrum and software development in general. Sprints are quite intensive. As a develper you never really get to slack off, every day you have to stand at that danged meeting and tell everyone what you have accomplished yesterday.

In addition to the actual rest itself, there is another good reason to have some slack between sprints. After the sprint demo and retrospective, both the team and the product owner will be full of information and ideas to digest. If they immediately run off and start planning the next sprint, chances are nobody will have had a chance to digest any information or lessons learned, the product owner will not have had time to adjust hist priorities after the sprint demo, etc.

At the very least, try to make sure that the sprint retrospective and the subsequent sprint planning meeting don't occur on the same day. Everybody should at least have a good night's sprintless sleep before starting a new sprint.

One way to do this is "lab days" (or whatever you choose to call them). That is, days where developers are allowed to do essentially whatever they want. For example read up on the latest tools and APIs, study for a certification, discuss nerdy stuff with colleagues, code a hobby project, etc.

Our goal is to have a lab day between each sprint. That way you get a netural rest between sprints, and you will have a dev team that gets a realistic chance to keep their knowledge up-to-date. Plus it's a pretty attractive employment benefit.