The purpose of this article is to give you a summary of the changes in The Scrum Guide 2020 that was released on 18 November 2020 by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. These changes were made with input from the community of Scrum users around the globe. This updated version helps bring Scrum to all industries and organizations. The 2020 Scrum Guide also includes updates to several major elements of the Scrum framework.

What hasn’t changed

Scrum is still a lightweight framework to solve complex problems and deliver value. Scrum is still about a cross-functional team of people collaborating closely with one another and their stakeholders. as a team, they create valuable and useful increments every sprint.

What has changed

There are a number of changes in the Scrum Guide.

• It’s less prescriptive, simpler language is used and software-specific terminology has been removed
• changes to some definitions, e.g., scrum definition, empiricism, product backlog, sprint goal, sprint backlog, increment, definition of done
• removed (e.g., “scrum uses”) or reorganized content (e.g., “measuring progress toward goals”)
• elements added or their relationships clarified, e.g., the “commitments” product goal (new), sprint goal and definition of done
• the concept of a development team within a scrum team was removed to reduce the potential for dysfunctions between the product owner and the development team (“us vs. them”) and focus the entire scrum team on the same objective
• a scrum team now consists of the product owner, developers, and the scrum master. the people doing the work of creating a usable increment are called developers
• the “entire scrum team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful increment every sprint. The developers are accountable for all aspects of creating the usable increment
• the terms “accountable” and “responsible” are used more consistently, and “roles” is replaced by “accountabilities”
• the scrum guide now uses the terms “self-managing” and “self-management” to emphasize that scrum teams choose “who, how and what to work on” whereas the scrum guide 2017 used the terms “self-organizing” and “self-organization” to describe that development teams chose “who and how to do work”
• the term servant-leader was removed, and scrum masters are now described as “true leaders who serve the scrum team and the larger organization”
• sprint planning now has three topics: “why is this sprint valuable?”, is the new first topic
• the purpose of events is clarified and the description how to conduct them is less prescriptive
• a “product goal” is introduced, serving as a target and describing a future state of the product
• it is clarified that multiple increments can be delivered within a sprint, even prior to the end of a sprint. sprint review is not a gate to releasing value.

Get your copy today

To download the latest copy of the Scrum Guide 2020, click here. You will also find a series of articles, blogs, videos and more that pertain to the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide released on November 18, 2020.