Scrum is used by teams in every industry—from software and finance to healthcare, education, and marketing—to tackle complex work and deliver value early and often. No matter your role, scrum offers a simple, powerful way to organize work and adapt to change.
To help make the essentials of scrum even more accessible, experienced Certified Scrum Trainers Tobias Mayer and Bob Hartman created "A simple guide to scrum." With input from colleagues across the professional scrum community, this resource distills the official Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland into a shorter, easy-to-reference format. It doesn't add or remove any essential elements. Instead, this simple guide presents the framework in a way that's quick to read and simple to revisit.
Whether you're new to scrum or continuing your learning after a course like Scrum Essentials, this guide is designed to help you put the fundamentals into action by applying them in your day-to-day work.
A Simple Guide to Scrum
Scrum is a lightweight, team-centric framework for solving complex problems and generating value. Purposefully incomplete, scrum is designed to be built upon by the collective intelligence of the people using it.
Founded on empiricism and lean thinking, scrum enables teams to work creatively, adapting to changing requirements, while generating value for the user, early and often. For this to be successful, those implementing scrum need to work with focus, and embody certain values, including, but not limited to, commitment, openness, respect, and courage.
Work is done in short cycles, known as sprints, typically of one to four weeks duration. The sprint is the heartbeat of scrum, creating rhythm and allowing for rapid feedback.
Implementing scrum effectively requires that the following elements are clearly established and maintained.
The scrum team
The fundamental unit of scrum is a small, self-managing, cross-functional team with three accountabilities, often referred to as the three scrum roles.
- Developers — (3-8) individuals with different skills, who collaboratively create a valuable increment each sprint.
- Product owner — (1) the voice of the business; the PO maximizes product value by talking with stakeholders, sharing the product goal and managing the product backlog.
- Scrum master — (1) organizational change agent; ensures scrum is applied effectively while fostering an environment for continuous learning and personal growth.
A note on scaling: If the scrum team grows too large, the members should reorganize into multiple cohesive teams, each focused on the same product. Therefore, they should share the same product goal, product backlog, and product owner.
Commitments
A clear purpose directs the work and makes the intent visible to all.
- Product goal — describes a future state of the product: a commitment to clear direction.
- Sprint goal — a single objective towards the product goal: a commitment to incremental value.
- Definition of Done — a commitment to quality for all work items.
Artifacts
These elements provide transparency. Each one is reviewed regularly at one or more of the Scrum events.
- Product backlog — an evolving, ordered list of items, committed to the product goal; this backlog is regularly refined and updated.
- Sprint backlog — selected product backlog items and a plan of action committed to the sprint goal.
- Increment — a concrete stepping stone towards the product goal, thoroughly verified against the definition of done.
Events
There are five events: three are sprint events, one is a daily event, and one a meta-event containing the other four. These events allow inspection and adaptation to occur on a regular basis, at different levels of granularity.
- Sprint — a time-boxed container for the work and the other four events; the heartbeat of scrum, where ideas are turned into value.
- Sprint planning — occurs at the start of every sprint: product owner and developers define the sprint goal and select product backlog items to include in the sprint backlog.
- Daily scrum — occurs every working day, ideally at the same time and place: a short developer conversation to inspect/adapt the sprint backlog in service to the sprint goal.
- Sprint review — occurs at the end of every sprint: stakeholders and users inspect the increment, and offer feedback; the scrum team may update the product backlog.
- Sprint retrospective — occurs immediately after the sprint review: the scrum team reflects on the sprint and identifies changes to improve its effectiveness.
Scrum is a container for agility, inviting in other techniques, methodologies, and practices. The Scrum framework, adopted holistically, enables teams to inspect, adapt, and deliver valuable products in complex environments.
Bookmark the simple guide to scrum in your browser.
Scrum is intentionally lightweight and practical. The more you use it, the more you learn how its simple structure supports better focus, collaboration, and results.
Ready to take the next step in your scrum journey?
Don't stop learning and building on your skills. Today's teams and organizations need multi-skilled leaders who are ready to approach any problem with agility.
If you're ready to move beyond the basics, explore the Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®) course for a deeper, hands-on understanding of the framework and how to use scrum to make a greater impact. Or check out Certified Agile Leader® 1 (CAL 1™) to develop the leadership skills needed to deliver results in fast-moving environments.