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Yes, absolutely. It's supposed to be a happy medium between everything being planned out months in advance with no flexibility on one hand, and constantly changing priorities such that developer workloads change beneath their feet before they get a chance to make significant headway. Your model sounds like it could be reasonably described as 4-week sprints.

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I really don't think so. We have processes that happen on a 4-week cadence, and about 10% of the engineering team rotates through duties in shepherding those processes. For all other devs, the experience is to pick up a feature, work on it for as long as it takes with periodic technical check-ins, complete the code review, and then pick up their next feature, completely independently of our 4-week release cycle. Is that still sprints?

I would say a key difference is the "completely independently". "agile" models tend to make the independent unit a small team (say 2-5 developers, along with designers, QA people and product people). And within that team it's generally considered best practice for everyone to eat least be keeping an eye on what the others are working on and be familiar enough with it that they could pick it up if need be.

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