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As you can probably tell, I am very new at this and I have lots of questions. If some of these sound silly, please be lenient. BTW, before I ask them, I go through the posts to see if my questions have been answered. It's always possible that they already have and I missed the post, so if that's the case, just point me to the right thread - you don't have to waste your time re-answering the same question(s).

I have read 100 times that a typical sprint length for a scrum team is 2 weeks with a max of 4 weeks. But, I have not seen anywhere the justification for this. What is so magical about 2 or four weeks? Couldn't there be situations where a longer sprint may be better?

Well, not sure, but if I had to guess I'd say it's because you want to know if any possible problems as quickly as possible.

I believe that 4 week sprints is what scrum (Ken Schwaber) prescribes as a good sprint. However, we have used 1,2,3 and 4 week sprints and our experience has been a that: 1 week sprint is sometimes too short to complete the team commitments, 2 weeks appears to be the sweet spot for most projects. We 3 or 4 week sprints but in many cases we could not utilize the QA team effectively because QA would have more slack time in first week of the sprint. In final analysis, the type of project also plays a significant role in deciding the length of the sprint.

Thanks, Paris K., it makes sense. It's just that I am hearing all these numbers and terms thrown about and as a newbie, I'm having a hard time distinguishing between a rule/standard and a preference. But, I am learning fast