These days, short iterations are more common. 2 weeks is more common. But remember also that the outcome of systems engineering is not the same as for sw development. The outcome of the latter is implementation while the outcome of the former is specification. For Agile SE, 2 weeks - 1 month is most common from what I've seen, but longer happens as well, especially in large projects.

For large-scale systems with systems and software, it is common to have iterations occur the fastest at the lower levels and somewhat slower as larger scale assemblies are constructed such as a factor of 2-3x the lowest.

• b

Just adding a reference from https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html:

"Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale."

which seems to allow SW iterations of 2 months

In Agile Software Engineering (SW) projects, have you seen iterations of 8 weeks each? It seems that the maximum length is 4 weeks (for each scrum sprint), but could a complex project that has for instance a lot of sub-systems and many stakeholders, require SW iterations of 8 weeks each to create visible and deployable results at the end of each iteration?

On the other hand, agile Systems Engineering (SE) iterations of 8 weeks each may not be so uncommon, as the purpose of each iteration is to create enough work for the downstream engineering teams to do their work. During those 8 weeks, the SE team will have to work on the requirements, create enough use cases (= agile epics/capabilities/features/enablers), architectural artifacts, create detailed operational scenarios, define interfaces between sub-systems, create/update validation test plans and procedures, etc., and that's a lot of work! So 8 weeks may not be excessive. Correct?

Please share your experience with agile projects that may require long SW iterations.

Thanks