140 Practical Tips To Improve Your Scrum

Learn the importance of technical coaching for a scrum master, who should provide basic high-level guidance—from tdd to refactoring—to help the team succeed while experts own the details.

Coach your team to adopt automated scanning tools for security and syntax scanning, integrate them into the continuous integration process, and enforce strict code quality before releasing to production.

Watch out for gold plating by maintaining a shared understanding of the product vision and PBIs between the product owner and developers; the scrum master uses retrospectives to prevent it.

Learn how a scrum master spots cherry picking, diagnoses slow code review queues, and coaches the team to work on all tasks with equal effort.

Scrum masters coach teams to adopt a common method of documenting code, ensuring new developers understand what code does and why it exists, improving collaboration and efficiency.

As a scrum master, coach the development team to make the code right before making it fast. Emphasize maintainability by leaving clear comments in key code for future collaboration.

Coach your team to avoid large single files by breaking code into smaller ones. Improve testing, documentation, and code reviews, while boosting understanding and reusability in agile environments.

Coach your team as a scrum master to foster secure coding habits by teaching security guidelines for secure applications and reminding junior developers of the importance of protecting against hackers.

A scrum master reminds team and technical leaders to help new developers write visually clean and secure code, especially junior developers new to team environments.

Coach teams to enforce coding standards for consistent code using tools and the one hand rule, so code reads as if written by one developer and collaboration improves.

Remind your team to design code with the end use case in mind, ensuring scalable and robust solutions for web or mobile apps that handle future pivots.

Coaches the team to perform regular refactoring. Emphasizes considering the overall design to improve readability, reduce complexity, and enhance maintainability and extensibility across the code base.

As a scrum master, prioritize security over speed by embedding security early in the development cycle, starting at pull requests, to reduce mean time to repair and avoid vulnerable code.

Map out the release process and automate repetitive tasks to avoid manual deployments and build something of value customers want. Use the scrum master tip to persuade toward customer value.

Own your quality as your product grows by coaching your team to implement automated tests beyond unit tests, including integration tests, so quality stays everyone's responsibility.

Learn the essentials of test-driven development (TDD): write tests, run them, code to pass, refactor, and expand coverage, while recognizing its quality and business benefits for Scrum teams.

Weigh refactor versus rewrite against business and marketplace conditions first, technology second. Remind leaders to prioritize customer needs and return on investment over tech perfection to avoid market risk.

Coach your team to treat bugs reaching production as a failure in the process, not in people or code, and pursue stretch goals.

Coach your team to embrace a zero defect culture by presenting only fully tested, bug-free stories to the product owner, who rejects known bugs and elevates them in the backlog.

Coach your team to adopt automated testing, including regression test automation and security vulnerability scanning on nightly or weekly cycles, with developers reviewing defect reports during daily scrum.

Timebox spikes and research tasks to guard the big-picture goals, empowering a self-empowering team while preventing deadlines from slipping and protecting velocity and customer value.

Reward the scrum team with time off or a team-chosen week to meet delivery dates, focusing on teamwork, refactoring, and addressing technical debt rather than individual rewards.

As a Scrum Master, identify why a top developer feels bored and keep them excited with new projects, learning opportunities, and challenging work—not money.

Recognize happiness as the leading indicator of team performance and, as a scrum master, coach the organization to build a happy team through celebrations, small wins, and culture change.

Lead as a Scrum Master by coaching your team to celebrate big wins, small wins, and even tiny progress. Celebrating progress boosts morale and triggers dopamine release, reinforcing positive momentum.

As a scrum master, coach your organization to prepare for the first sprint by enabling a potentially shippable increment with initial ux design, Jira, and continuous deployment.

Rename the initial prep phase from sprint zero to setup or prep work, clarifying it does not produce a potentially shippable increment and is not a sprint.

Explain how backlog refinement should be prioritized in scrum, noting the 10% time rule is obsolete and advocating a pre refinement session to prepare the backlog for the next sprint.

Ask this: if we paid for the sprint with our own money, which work would maximize return on investment?

If sprint planning runs short, don’t extend the time box; cover the first couple of days during planning and complete the rest in about thirty minutes after the daily scrum.

The product owner should attend sprint planning to address developers’ questions and clarify acceptance criteria. Attendance reduces communication risk and aligns on sprint goals.

Establish backlog refinement and a pre-backlog refinement cadence to prepare for sprint planning, making them mandatory, stress-free, and a quick final check that keeps sprints on track.

Learn to craft a better sprint goal by introducing a starter sprinkle at sprint planning and finalizing a sprinkle afterward, and define how we will know we achieved it.

Prepare for the inevitable by inserting a buffer item into the sprint backlog with sensible story points, safeguarding capacity and resilience against life happens moments.

Coach your team to stay vigilant about technical debt, weigh when to incur it, and discuss it in sprint retrospectives while upholding a definition of done to address existing debt.

coach your team to avoid putting names on every subtask in sprint planning; name only the next-day tasks to preserve flexibility, avoid artificial dependencies, and support a truly cross-functional team.

Apply the 80 percent rule to push for sustainable progress, aiming to meet the sprint goal 100% while delivering about 80% of planned work.

Apply the 20% rule, spending up to 20% of each sprint on bug fixes and refactoring to curb technical debt and maintain quality, avoiding becoming a feature factory.

Coach your team to keep the sprint task board up to date by adding subtasks to the PBI whenever new work emerges, ensuring transparency in the sprint plan.

Use WIP limits to boost focus, reveal blockers, and surface bottlenecks in scrum, a Kanban concept applied through column limits on your board; experiment empirically to find the best limits.

Coach developers to focus on current sprint work, avoiding distractions from the product backlog; use pair programming to prevent toe stepping and improve collaboration.

Coach your product owner to avoid changing the current sprint scope, even as directions shift between sprints. If changes occur, shorten the sprint to prevent demoralization and sustain momentum.

Ask two questions at the daily scrum to keep the sprint task board current: what changed, and how will we update the plan while preserving the sprint goal.

Watch for hidden impediments in the daily scrum when no blockers are reported. Encourage transparency, psychological safety, and courage to share obstacles to protect trust and prevent issues from accumulating.

Use a 15-minute parking lot after the daily scrum to keep the meeting focused and move rabbit-hole topics there, with a body language cue and video on.

Coach your team to define a strict definition of done that preserves quality and share it with stakeholders during sprint reviews to ease trade-off discussions.

Experiment with a mid-sprint review to demo about 50% of items to stakeholders, forcing creativity and promoting agile scrum over mini waterfall.

Invite salespeople to sprint reviews to gain first-hand feedback from customers about what they will pay for, helping you validate features and reduce wasted effort.

Assess sprint success by aiming for stakeholders’ cheer during sprint review, and plan backwards during sprint planning from the end game of a happy, motivated team.

Address incomplete stories in sprint reviews, noting demos of unfinished work can mislead stakeholders; coach for feedback outside the review and own only demo items that are done.

Discover why the sprint review is not an acceptance meeting for product owners or stakeholders, and how to foster collaboration between the product owner and stakeholders throughout the sprint.

Explore powerful questions for the sprint retrospective to inspect the definition of done, measure progress, and surface systemic problems. Enhance driving purpose, team relationships, and collective responsibility to improve empiricism.

Improve sprint outcomes by refining your definition of done through two steps: start with a basic, releasable increment and progressively tighten it toward production release, aligned with quality commitments.

Learn how a directly responsible individual, or DRI, assigns accountability for every action item from the sprint retrospective to boost follow-through.

Explore how to run retrospectives on retrospectives by scheduling ritual sessions, at least quarterly, to keep sprint retrospectives engaging and improve team performance through higher-quality retrospectives.

Apply future state questions in scrum to envision six months ahead, plan today, identify causes of failure, and prevent them, boosting creativity with a positive, collaborative session.

Coach the team to overcome limiting beliefs in the spring retrospective, using two questions on hindering beliefs and one action today, across continuous integration, continuous delivery, and test driven development.

Combat sprint retrospective stagnation by keeping sessions fresh and engaging for developers. Experiment with small changes to questions, format, or tools like Figma or mirror to draw the best ideas.