Our team switched to a mid-week sprint cycle 14 sprints ago and we love it. Our team consists of six developers (4 in main office, 2 offshore) working in two-week sprints. Our every-other-week meeting schedule is:

  • Wednesday morning: Sprint Review
  • Wednesday afternoon: Backlog Review (PO and SM adjust priorities, finish cards)
  • Thursday morning: Sprint Planning

The activities at the start and end of a sprint are crucial to its success, so scheduling them during the peak midweek days ensures they get the focus they deserve.

It’s also great not to interrupt the boundary between sprints with a weekend. We essentially treat Wednesday as a between-sprints day — i.e. a day set aside for reflecting on the previous sprint and gearing up for the next. It’s so much better to do that when everything is fresh in people’s minds and their attention isn’t turning to the weekend. It also greatly improves the life of the PO/PM/SM. (I can’t tell you how many of my weekends in past jobs were spoiled by scrambling to finalize plans for the next sprint!)

Likewise, it’s great to have a solid week of uninterrupted work in the middle of the sprint. I’ve found this has a subtle beneficial effect of discouraging coding right to the end of the sprint — i.e. Friday becomes a natural target for finishing heavy-duty coding, with Monday and Tuesday reserved for code reviews, acceptance testing and deployment.

(Originally posted in answer to this question on pm.stackexchange.com)