A new update to the Scrum Guide has just been released today, as we celebrate Scrum’s 25th anniversary. What’s changed? Here’s my spur of the moment list of major changes:
- Now two goals, the new product goal and the sprint goal, are included to provide focus towards a larger objective. The product goal (not included in the earlier versions of the guide) will be the North Star of the increments, meaning every sprint should move closer to the Product Goal.
- Emphasis on a single Scrum Team. There is no development team anymore, just developers, scrum master and product owner in a single Scrum team. Developers are “the people in the Scrum Team that are committed to creating any aspect of a usable Increment each Sprint.”
- Emphasis on accountability, instead of roles. The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product and The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide, even if they delegate or enable others to do the work.
- The Scrum Master is now a “Leader who serves” and not a “Servant Leader”. I am not sure about the thinking behind these re-wording. I’ll dig deeper into it the next days
- Commitments. Three commitments are now mandatory for the three artifacts:
- Product Goal for the Product Backlog
- Sprint Goal for the Sprint Backlog
- Definition of Done for the Increment
- The Team is now self-managed, instead of self-organized. That’s to clarify and point out that the team is self-managing around the product goal. The Team decides “who does what, when, and how” for delivering a valuable Increment aimed at the Sprint and Product Goal. It’s not “do whatever you want” (As per Jeff Shuterland, it seems that’s a common fear/misunderstanding )
- The world lean appears for the first time in the Scrum Guide, as Scrum is “founded on empiricism and lean thinking”.
- Some elements have been removed from the guide. Probably the most notable is the “three questions for the daily scrum” that are still widely used. I haven’t been using them for a long time, though 🙂
- The Guide is now leaner, from 19 to 13 pages
Jeff Shuterland speaking about the new Scrum Guide 2020 at the Zoom Conference “Scrum Guide 2020”
That’s all for the moment. In the next weeks and months we’ll see the impact of the new reframing 🙂