A significant revision of the official Scrum Guide 2020 was released this month (here). Here are my thoughts when comparing it to the previous 2017 version.

Overall Thoughts

  • The Scrum Guide is even more streamlined now. The length of the artifact has been reduced from 19 to 14 pages. Kudos to the authors, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, for their consistent emphasis on short & sweet.
  • The update includes a renewed emphasis on the words “commitment” and “accountability”.

Changes

  • Right off the bat, the Scrum definition now has a concise summary using four steps:
    1. Product Owner orders the work
    2. Scrum Team selects the work and creates an increment of value during a Sprint
    3. Scrum Team and stakeholders inspect the results of the Sprint and adjust
    4. Repeat

I just love this simplistic and intuitive capture of an incredibly powerful framework.

  • Remember the Scrum Guide statement that the Development Team size is 3 – 9 members? Gone. Now the guidance is inclusive of ALL of the Scrum Team members (including Product Owner and Scrum Master) – “The Scrum Team is … typically 10 or fewer people”. This represents a significant simplification and avoids questions like “Do we add the Product Owner and Scrum Master to the 3 – 9 members?” Much simpler – the entire team is 10 or less!


    

  • The 2020 Scrum Guide is replete with words such as “accountability” and “accountable” instead of “responsibility” and “responsible” when discussing the three Scrum roles. While some Agile purists will react negatively (and already have), I believe this word change is better. Accountability conveys being answerable for the activities and decisions, while responsibility conveys exactly who completes the task. This provides another element of flexibility in terms of who performs the actual underlying activities of each role. As an example, instead of “The Product Owner is responsible for …”, the 2020 update says “The Product Owner is accountable for …”.
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  • Sprint Planning now contains three official topics instead of two! The authors have explicitly brought the formulation of the Sprint Goal as topic #1. This topic is followed by the two original topics: selection of items from the Product Backlog and planning the work necessary to create the increment. This is a good move as most Scrum teams neglect defining the Sprint Goal.
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  • The 2017 Scrum Guide includes a statement in the Sprint Planning section about decomposing work for the first few days of the Sprint. I bet you did not know that! This sentence is now removed, likely due to the confusion that it created.
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  • The Daily Scrum event no longer includes the three example questions (what I did yesterday, what I will do today, and impediments). This is definitely a good move as blindly following this script can lead to the feeling that the Daily Scrum is a status report. No one likes status reports! A much better alternative is to walk the Sprint Backlog starting at the highest priority work item and ask “Who can work on this item to help get it to Done today or tomorrow? This approach encourages pairing and swarming, which will likely increase the team’s overall throughput and put them in a position of being able to complete work items much earlier in the Sprint.
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  • The Sprint Retrospective section now contains a sentence that I absolutely love: “Assumptions that led them astray are identified and their origins explored.”
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  • The Sprint Retrospective section also loosens the previous guidance on adding the improvement items into the next Sprint Backlog. Now the guidance is to add them “as soon as possible” and “they MAY even be added to the Sprint Backlog for the next Sprint”.
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  • The 2020 Scrum Guide introduces a new concept, the Product Goal. The Product Goal is described as the future state of the product and a long-term objective for the Scrum Team. The Product Goal is actually included a smart of the Product Backlog artifact!
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  • The Sprint Backlog explicitly includes the Sprint Goal now.
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  • Each Scrum artifact now has an associated “commitment”:

      

    1. For the Product Backlog, the commitment is the Product Goal
      2. 

    2. For the Sprint Backlog, the commitment is the Sprint Goal
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    3. For the Increment, the commitment is the Definition of Done
      4. 

    

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While I see the author’s intent here, I think the use of the word “commitment” here is incorrect. In reality, the goals and DoD are objectives, or perhaps desired outcomes. The word “commitment” here feels like a force fit.


    

  • The Product Backlog description has loosened its previous requirement that all backlog items have attributes of order, description, and size. Now the phrase “attributes often vary with the domain of work” is used.
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Scrum is the most popular Agile framework, and for good reason. It is a tried and true framework used in many different situations worldwide, both for product development and non-product development. The continual evolution of the Scrum Guide to a leaner and more flexible framework is a great move for us Agile practitioners.


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