Yesterday, November 18th, there was a 3-hour virtual event to celebrate the launch of the 2020 Scrum Guide with nearly 20,000 registrants. I connected 15 minutes before the start but received a message that the limit of 1000 participants was reached, and I couldn’t participate. Luckily the event was streamed, and you can now watch it on demand (see below). Can you imagine It’s been 25 years since the launch of the first Scrum Guide?
The guide is now crisper, leaner (only 13 pages), more transparent and even less prescriptive. The concept of a separate development team within the team is now eliminated. Just the self-managing Scrum team with three sets of accountabilities (PO, SM, and Developers). Each of the three artifacts now contain ‘commitments’ to them. For the Product Backlog it is the Product Goal, the Sprint Backlog has the Sprint Goal to be defined during the Sprint Planning when discussing the “Why”, and the Increment has the Definition of Done. They exist to bring transparency and focus on the progress of each artifact.
A pity the guide only contains plain text. I think some pictures could add value too. On the other hand, other organizations, e.g., Scaled Agile could take an example to bring back the framework to being a minimally sufficient framework. With every new release of SAFe, the framework is growing without any removements, and as a consequence making it more complicated.
To download the 2020 Scrum Guide
To watch the event
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