Scrum Guide: Audio Book - Free Audio Course

Explore how Scrum emerged in the 1990s to manage and develop products, enabling frequent releases and adaptive teams across software, hardware, and services worldwide.

Explore empirical process control and empiricism, where knowledge comes from experience to guide decisions, scrum uses iterative, incremental cycles through transparency, inspection, and adaptation to boost predictability and control risk.

Make significant aspects of the process visible to those responsible for outcomes by using a common standard and language, achieving a shared definition of done.

The Scrum team, with a product owner, development team, and Scrum Master, is self-organizing and cross-functional, delivering work iteratively and incrementally to maximize feedback.

Lead the product owner maximizes product value by managing the product backlog, clearly expressing and prioritizing backlog items, and ensuring visibility and shared understanding across the development team.

The development team delivers a potentially releasable increment at the end of each sprint, with self-organizing, cross-functional members empowered to manage their own work, accountable as a team.

Keep the development team size small enough to stay nimble yet large enough to complete significant work within a sprint, balancing interaction, productivity gains, and skill requirements.

The scrum master promotes and supports scrum as defined in the scrum guide, serving as a servant leader who helps the team and its stakeholders optimize interactions to maximize value.

The scrum master supports the product owner by clarifying goals, scope, and product domain, enabling backlog management, clear backlog items, empirical planning, and facilitating scrum events as needed.

The scrum master serves the organization by leading adoption, coaching implementation, collaborating with other scrum masters, and helping employees understand and enact scrum and empirical product development to boost productivity.

Explore the sprint, a time-boxed cycle of up to one month delivering a potentially releasable product increment through planning, daily scrums, development work, reviews, and retrospectives toward a sprint goal.

The product owner can cancel a sprint before the time box ends, especially if the sprint goal becomes obsolete due to company direction or market changes, with incomplete items reactivated.

Sprint planning unites the scrum team to decide what can be delivered in upcoming increment and how it will be achieved within the eight-hour time box for a one-month sprint.

In sprint planning, the development team forecasts the sprint functionality, while the product owner sets the sprint goal and backlog items to achieve it, with the team assessing capacity.

Learn how the development team, guided by the product owner and scrum master, plans, decomposes, and self-organizes to convert sprint backlog items into a working increment toward the sprint goal.

Set a sprint goal that guides the development team through backlog and delivers a coherent increment, allowing flexible functionality; if needed, the team negotiates the scope with the product owner.

Lead a 15-minute daily scrum where the development team plans the next 24 hours, inspects progress toward the sprint goal and backlog, and promotes a self-organizing, impediment-resolving team.

Explore how sprint retrospectives let the scrum team inspect past sprints, identify improvements, and plan actions to enhance people, processes, and tools in the next sprint.

Monitor progress by tracking total work remaining, comparing sprint reviews, and using transparent metrics like burn down, burn up, and cumulative flows to support empiric, forward-looking decisions.

Manage the sprint backlog as the development team selects product backlog items, plans the increment toward the sprint goal, and updates a real-time plan that emerges during the sprint.

Track the sprint backlog to monitor progress and project the likelihood of meeting the sprint goal by recording total work remaining at the daily scrum and throughout the sprint.

Foster artifact transparency to optimize value and control risk by basing decisions on the perceived state of artifacts and guiding the team with inspection and pattern sensing.

Scrum is free in this guide, with immutable roles, events, artifacts, and rules. Implementing only parts of Scrum does not make it Scrum; it exists in its entirety.

Acknowledges thousands who contributed to scrum and highlights early collaborators like Jeff Sutherland, Jeff McKenna, John scum, and Ken Schwimmer with Mike Smith and Chris Martin, whose work refined scrum.

Trace the history of scrum from the 1995 Uppsala conference to its first formal definition, and its evolution through the efforts of Jeff Sutherland and Ken Waber.