On July 6th Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the co-creators of Scrum, conducted a webinar to discuss the recent updates they made to the Scrum Guide. During the session we saw how the learning from 20+ years of Scrum was being used to continuously improve the framework and continuously stress key pieces of the framework.
We thought it’d be beneficial to share our takeaways with you. To help provide context, we recommend you download the latest version of the Scrum Guide from ScrumGuides.org and give it a read.
Takeaway #1: Getting Aligned on Values
The new version of the Scrum Guide now officially includes the five Scrum Values – Commitment, Openness, Focus, Respect, and Courage. The values first appeared in the book “Agile Software Development with Scrum” by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, but weren’t included in the Scrum Guide. Getting teams and organizations to work on aligning to and living out these values is hugely important for a successful Scrum implementation.
Takeaway #2: Refinement is Not an Event
While there hasn’t been a change to the Scrum Guide on this topic, Jeff and Ken reiterated the purpose for it not being defined as an event. Refinement is absolutely necessary for teams to be able to identify dependencies, complexity, and uncertainty. Refinement, however, can be done in many ways. Flexibility of the approach allows teams to tune Refinement to what works for them. Some teams treat it as an event. Some teams treat it as a series of events. Some teams treat it as a persistent ongoing behavior.
Takeaway #3: Measure Delivery, Not Practices
Comments in the webinar highlighted the reality that a lot of teams and organizations are still missing the point. The purpose of Scrum is not to get good at playing Scrum. The purpose of Scrum is to deliver valuable software to your customer. Take a minute and look at how Scrum success is measured in your organization. Are the measures focused on the specifics of playing Scrum or are they focused on delivering valuable software to you customer?
Takeaway #4: Estimation Impacts Delivery
Estimation approaches lie on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, let’s call it the left end, you have approaches that slow down the delivery of value. At the other end of the spectrum, the right end, you have approaches that speed up the delivery of value. In the webinar, Jeff let people know what the data shows. Estimating in hours slows delivery. As Jeff put it, “it’s the slowest approach.” The No Estimates approach is a little to the right of that, but inherently slows delivery. Using User Stories + Story Points + Tasking is fast and speeds up delivery. Using Small User Stories + Points is fast and speeds up delivery even more. They key is to make the User Stories small enough so we can discover the dependencies, complexity, and uncertainty that are hidden inside. Those are the things that ultimately slow teams down. While teams can’t avoid those hidden gems, they can learn to use approaches that will help them see them sooner.
Takeaway #5: Don’t Accept Anti-Patterns
It’s key for teams to understand Scrum anti-patterns. Unfortunately, some Scrum anti-patterns have been declared to be useful and necessary patterns for playing Scrum. “Acceptable Anti-Patterns” so to speak. Take things like an endless sprint 0 or the idea of hardening sprints. They aren’t useful or necessary. As Jeff explained, they’re impediments and they need to be solved, not accepted. For some reason, I think Jeff would have gotten along well with Albert Einstein – “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Takeaway #6: Scaling Can Induce and Mask Problems
Scaling is a valid challenge, but it shouldn’t be solved with a one size fits all mindset. It’s extremely situational. When organizations attempt to solve their unique problems of scale with standard frameworks, they can induce more overhead than is needed. In addition, if teams aren’t playing Scrum effectively before scaling, then scaling won’t cure that problem. In fact, scaling can make relatively simple low-level impediments more complicated, harder to see, and more difficult to solve.
There you have it. Our takeaways for the 2016 Scrum Guide refresh. The slides and video from the session are available at ScrumInc.com.
Thank you for reading.
Comments are closed.