Scrum 101: From Beginner to Pro in 2 Hours

Understand scrum as the popular agile method with five timeboxed events, sprints, and a shippable product increment backed by a product backlog.

Describe the three core scrum roles—the development team, the product owner, and the scrum master—and how they collaborate to deliver valuable software via the product backlog and five scrum events.

Discover the three scrum artifacts—product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment—and how backlog items are refined and prioritized, how sprint backlog evolves, and how increments deliver working software.

Learn the five scrum values: openness, respect, courage, focus, and commitment, and how they foster collective commitment, align teams around sprint goals, and guide work on epics and stories.

Agree on the definition of done for each backlog item before moving to sprint backlog, then deliver an increment that meets item-level and increment-level definitions of done by sprint end.

Explore the three pillars of scrum: transparency, inspection, and adaptation, and how courage, openness, and respect empower teams to reveal work, inspect progress, and adapt sprint backlogs in real time.

Learn how user stories drive agile scrum by keeping user needs front and center, written on index cards for quick, modular requirements that replace long documents.

Use story points to measure relative size of user stories, not exact effort or deadlines. Track sprint velocity to plan upcoming sprints, using consistent t-shirt or Fibonacci scales.

Explore planning poker, a collaborative card-based method to estimate story points in sprint planning. The guide covers steps from card distribution to unanimous estimates that promote transparency and cross-functional learning.

Explore burndown charts that track sprint progress by plotting remaining work against time, showing ideal versus real paths and day-by-day story point completion in a two-week sprint.

Learn how backlog items and product backlog refinement shape priorities, estimates, and value. Discover how the Product Owner and Scrum Master align for sprint planning and backlog readiness.

Define a release plan from a nine-feature backlog by grouping sprints into three releases, ensuring the increment is delivered and considering disruption and push versus pull updates.

Learn to use story maps within scrum to visualize the backlog, plan the backbone and walking skeletons, and prioritize features for a social media app.

Use a persona to visualize an ideal user and guide how the team writes user stories, align with goals and frustrations, and refine product decisions in Scrum.

Explore how to run retrospectives with four steps—set the stage, gather data, generate insights, and decide the next steps—plus SVP, color-code dots, and fishbone analysis for improvements.