New Scrum Guide
As you may have heard, yesterday Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the co-creators of Scrum, released a new version of the Scrum Guide. The revisions address and clarify some important issues and are made with the cooperation of Scrum practitioners from around the world. Let's take a quick look at what has changed.
What's Changed?
The section called "Uses of Scrum" explains the original purpose behind developing the framework and lists a wide variety of use cases. Besides software, which is probably the most commonly quoted area of Scrum implementation, it mentions that Scrum has been successfully used in developing schools, governments, and managing operations of almost everything we use in our daily lives.
The list also includes some areas that are not strictly related to developing tangible products, for example, research and identification of viable markets, technologies, and product capabilities.
A very important addition was made to the Sprint Backlog section: "To ensure continuous improvement, (the Sprint Backlog) includes at least one high priority way in which the team works, identified in the previous Retrospective meeting."
This is a big step towards strengthening the team and the process. Until now the implementation of the Retrospective plan was left entirely to the discretion of the Development Team and was often placed on the back burner in favor of completing more timely items from the Product Backlog. This new requirement will force both the Development Teams and Product Owners to put renewed emphasis on continuous improvement. Let's remember that only healthy teams will create healthy increments.
The new Guide also clarifies the role of the Scrum Master, the definition of time-boxed events, and the Increment. There are also some changes to the Daily Scrum section, which will make things easier for the Development Team to conduct the meetings.
Practice Exam updated
We understand that using outdated materials to prepare for a certification test is very counter productive, so we worked hard to update the Practice Exam questions as soon as the new Scrum Guide became available. We're pleased to announce that the Practice Exam is now completely in line with the new revision of the Scrum Guide and our students can be confident they're preparing using the latest available information.
Resources
If you'd like to see the full list of revisions in the November 2017 Scrum Guide, visit the Scrum Guide Revisions page.
We also encourage you to watch a webinar where Jeff and Ken discuss the changes to the Scrum Guide. The video is available here.