What Is Scrum? A Guide to Roles, Events and Artifacts

Scrum is a lightweight framework for creating value in short cycles when you work on complex problems. The team produces a usable piece of the product in fixed-length periods (Sprints), reviews the result with stakeholders and decides the next step based on what it learned. This article is based on the 2020 edition of the Scrum Guide, the official definition of Scrum.

What is Scrum for?

Scrum’s real concern is uncertainty. In work where you can’t know up front what will work (a new product, changing customer expectations, technical unknowns), long plans go stale quickly. Instead, Scrum rests on three pillars:

• Transparency: the work and the progress are visible to everyone.
• Inspection: the team, the product and the process are reviewed at regular intervals.
• Adaptation: plans and ways of working change as soon as deviations appear.

The Scrum Team: three accountabilities

A Scrum Team is a small team, typically no more than 10 people, with all the skills needed to do the work end to end. It has three accountabilities:

• Product Owner: accountable for maximising the value of the product. Sets the Product Goal, orders the Product Backlog and keeps it transparent. More: What is a Product Owner?
• Scrum Master: accountable for Scrum being understood and for the team’s effectiveness. Removes impediments and coaches the team and the organisation. More: What is a Scrum Master?
• Developers: the people who create a usable increment every Sprint. They may be software engineers, designers, analysts or testers; what counts is the accountability for doing the work, not the job title.

Five events

1. The Sprint: a fixed-length period of one month or less that contains all the other events. A new Sprint starts as soon as the previous one ends. More: What is a Sprint?
2. Sprint Planning: the team decides together why the Sprint is valuable (the Sprint Goal), what will be done and how.
3. Daily Scrum: a meeting of at most 15 minutes in which the Developers inspect progress towards the Sprint Goal. It’s the plan for the day, not a status report.
4. Sprint Review: the increment is inspected with stakeholders, and the Product Backlog is updated with what was learned.
5. Sprint Retrospective: the team looks at how it works and picks concrete improvements for the next Sprint. Tips: How to run a better Sprint Retrospective

Three artifacts and their commitments

• Product Backlog, with its commitment, the Product Goal: where the product is heading.
• Sprint Backlog, with its commitment, the Sprint Goal: why this Sprint is valuable.
• Increment, with its commitment, the Definition of Done: the quality standard a piece of work must meet to count as done.

Scrum’s five values

Commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage. When these values aren’t lived, the events turn into empty rituals. We explain why they matter in The Five Scrum Values.

When does Scrum fit, and when doesn’t it?

Scrum is a strong choice for teams building a new product or feature, where all the skills they need are within the team.

Our experience in the field shows that if most of the work depends on several suppliers or other teams, and capacity isn’t in the team’s hands, fixed Sprint commitments break often. In that case Kanban, which makes work visible and manages flow, often works better. The right question isn’t “which framework is better?” but “where does our work wait?”

The most common mistakes in the field

• Reducing events to meetings. The Daily Scrum turns into a meeting where everyone reports to their manager.
• Working without a Sprint Goal. The Sprint becomes a to-do list of unrelated items.
• Not defining “done”. Work that isn’t tested or can’t be released is counted as finished.
• Turning the Product Owner into an order-taker. A Product Owner without authority to prioritise manages noise instead of value.
• Imposing Scrum as a mandatory template. Applying the same framework to everyone without first understanding the nature of the work.

Frequently asked questions

Is Scrum a project management method? No. Scrum isn’t a project management methodology but a lightweight framework for product development. It doesn’t define what to build; it defines how to learn and adapt together.

Is Scrum only for software teams? No. It’s used in marketing, HR and operations too, as long as the work involves uncertainty and the team can create value in short cycles.

How long should a Sprint be? One month at most. Most teams choose two weeks; what matters is that the length is fixed and you get feedback often enough.

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