140 Practical Tips To Improve Your Scrum

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.