SCRUM 2020 Summary — Part 1
It’s been a while, the last update to the scrum guide was in 2017.
2020 Scrum guide became leaner, focusing more on essentials & removing the prescriptive ways of executing events and relies on the collective intelligence of the scrum team. Please feel free to comment or provide feedback if you think I missed anything. I tried to consolidate it section by section.
- Purpose of Scrum Guide
Ken & Jeff stresses not to skip the core ideas of scrum which will result in hiding the problems rather than uncovering them. It was earlier stressed in Jeff’s book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, its nice to see the disclaimer within the scrum guide,
Changing the core design or ideas of Scrum, leaving out elements, or not following the rules of Scrum, covers up problems and limits the benefits of Scrum, potentially even rendering it useless.
2. Definition of Scrum
This section is completely rewritten, but the crux stays more or less the same.
They redefined the most important outcome of scrum.
2017 : Is a lightweight framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.
2020 : Is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams, and organisations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.
a couple of additions to note
Similar to section 1, it is again stressed that scrum will bring pain points or hurdles to the light, like the efficacy of management, environmental issues, quality of deliverable, progress, to name a few.
Scrum is left purposefully incomplete and it only focuses on the practice to achieve the principles of scrum theory
3. Scrum Theory
Complete rewrite but still it revolves around the three pillars of the scrum framework Transparency, Inspection & adaptation
Points to note:
Lean thinking to reduce waste, avoid complexity and focus on essentials
Transparency enables inspection. Inspection without transparency is misleading and wasteful.
Three artifacts that need to be transparent, namely Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog & Increment
From four events in 2017, it is now five formal events that enable inspection & adaption loop. But it’s all still the same, the sprint — container of all other events is also included in the count. Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review & Sprint retrospection are the five events/
Adaptation becomes more difficult when the people involved are not empowered or self-managing.
4. Scrum Values
Remains the same — Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. I would like to give it an acronym,
FORCC — Focus, Openness, Respect, Commitment & and Courage, pronounced as Force — the driving factor.
The most interesting updates are in the following sections — Scrum Team, Scrum Events & Scrum Artifacts.
..to be continued.
