What’s New and Improved in the 2020 Scrum Guide

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scrum guide 2020 update
Rachael Wilterdink > Agile > Scrum > Accountabilities > What’s New and Improved in the 2020 Scrum Guide

Recently, the creators of the Scrum Guide, Ken Schwaber, and Jeff Sutherland, released another update to the guide. The last update happened in 2017. I had the pleasure of listening to the session live, and after downloading and reading the updated guide, I thought I would share my key takeaways of what is new and improved in the 2020 Scrum Guide:

Roles / Teams

  • The new Scrum Guide is less prescriptive; the new version is more welcoming and inclusive of any type of work – not just software development
  • There is just ONE team. It’s not a Product Owner (PO) & Scrum Master (SM) + a Development (dev) sub-team – instead, it’s just the Scrum Team; everyone on the team (except PO & SM) is called a developer; the Scrum Team is more group-owned and unified
  • Scrum Teams are no longer called self-organizing. This has been replaced with “self-managing” (you decide who does what, when, and how)
  • The three roles are now called “accountabilities”
group of people watching on laptop

Daily Scrum

The following “three questions” are no longer prescribed for Scrum:

  1. What did you do yesterday to help accomplish the Sprint Goal?
  2. What are you doing today to help accomplish the Sprint Goal?
  3. Do you have any impediments/blockers in your way?

Now you can conduct your Daily Scrum however you want to, just so long as you have a plan for the day

Sprint Planning

goal lettering text on black background
  • The Sprint Planning event now has three topics instead of two:
  1. What can we accomplish?
  2. How are we going to do it?
  3. Why are we doing it? (this becomes the Sprint Goal)
  • There MUST be a unifying Sprint Goal
  • The Scrum Team makes a commitment to accomplish the Sprint Goal within the Sprint

Commitments / Artifacts​

brown wooden dock

The Sprint Goal previously existed as a concept, but not as an artifact. The same thing goes for the Definition of Done (DOD). These are now “official” artifacts of Scrum, along with a new item, which is a Product Goal.

  1. Product Goal
  2. Sprint Goal
  3. Definition of Done

The Product Goal is similar to a Product Vision, but it’s meant to be measurable (think about the SMART acronym: Specific, Measurable, Attainable / Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound). The Product Goal is the “North Star” for the product.

Responsibility and Accountability​

  • The Product Owner is responsible and accountable to ensure that there is a Sprint Goal
  • The Scrum Master is responsible and accountable for ensuring the team delivers on its Sprint Goal

Leader / Servant

The Scrum Master is now a leader and a servant to the team (no longer just a “servant leader”); the emphasis is now on leadership versus being a mere servant to the team. This is a significant shift from the previous version of the Scrum Guide and focuses on the value that the Scrum Master brings to the team as a leader.

Sprint Retrospective

The Scrum Team is no longer “required” to choose action items from the Sprint Retrospective to add to the next Sprint Backlog (it’s still a good practice, but no longer “required”).

Sprint Review

The Scrum Team should not let the Sprint Review be a gate (PMOs and Waterfall, anyone?); don’t wait until the end of a Sprint to show something to stakeholders or to release done increments.

Increments

The moment an item in the product backlog meets the Definition of Done, an increment is “born”.

Product Backlog Refinement​

woman in pink long sleeve shirt sticking post its on the wall

There is no longer a statement that Backlog Refinement should consume no more than 10% of a Scrum Team’s time during a Sprint (collaborating on and sizing items for upcoming Sprints). Again, this is to make the Scrum Guide less restrictive. Some teams might need more time, some might need less.

Final Words

I’m regularly accused of being a Scrum “purist”. That aside, I personally love the changes to the new Scrum Guide. I have already been practicing most of these changes with my current Scrum Team. I appreciate Ken and Jeff’s recognition that while Scrum was born from a desire to improve how software development is done, the concepts and practices of Scrum can be applied in all manner of applications.

I never really considered Scrum terribly prescriptive (as compared to other approaches such as predictive methodologies), but I am also happy to see that many of the former constraints have been removed. This will allow Scrum Teams to discover what works for them and continue to apply the three pillars of empiricism (inspection, adaptation, and transparency) to continually improve their Agile practices.

To get a free copy of the newly updated 2020 Scrum Guide, visit https://www.scrumguides.org/

After you have read the new Scrum Guide, let me know what you think about the changes. Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

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