An introduction to Scrum Patterns
Scrum is a cooperative game. The Scrum Guide is the official rule book, but it doesn’t tell you the rationale behind Scrum as a whole, or behind many of its successful practices… enter the world of Scrum Patterns!
When?
- Are you a Scrum practitioner and having problems?
- Do you find the Scrum Guide too vague?
- In need of hints, guidance or just practical solutions?
- Looking for complementary practices?
- Looking for a roadmap for your adoption?
- Do you want to know where to focus the improvement?
- Do you want to have some extra tools in your belt?
Please continue reading if you responded yes to any of these questions.
Why?
Scrum is a framework to discover and build your process. It’s purposefully incomplete and you need to add complementary practices that work in your context. It’s not a method to build your product, because it doesn’t describe any steps. It only tells you what’s going on (transparency), so that you can decide what to do with it (inspect and adapt). It doesn’t offer you any guidance on what to do next.
The Scrum patterns go beyond the what and into the whys of Scrum.
The Scrum Guide describes the basic rules of Scrum. It’s important to understand the rules, and it’s even useful to follow them most of the time. But reading the rulebook of chess won’t make you a great chess player. After learning the rules, the player then learns about common strategies for the game; the player may also learn basic techniques at this level.
The Scrum patterns amplify the Scrum Guide by showing teams how to solve problems in a specific context. Importantly, it explains why things work. Knowing this allows you to tailor the solution to your context. These solutions will help you implement and improve your use of Scrum, whether you are a beginner or an experienced practitioner.
What?
Let me quickly explain what a Scrum pattern is and how pattern languages can be used to combine them.
A Scrum Pattern
A Scrum pattern is a possible solution for a problem in a context, including the rationale.
Let’s look at an example, to make it concrete:
Each pattern describes the context, the problem, the forces and the solution.
Beyond being just a “solution to a problem in a context,” each pattern explains the forces that need to be considered when applying the pattern. The forces guide you to come up with your own solution. These forces explain why the pattern exists.
Note: there are no silver bullets; these patterns are based on collective experiences, and your situation may be different. You will need to locally adapt each pattern to your specific environment.
Pattern Languages
Individual patterns are practical, concrete and contain lots of information, but no pattern stands alone. For experienced practitioners, the pattern languages are interesting!
This graph describes meaningful pattern sequences, just as a language like English describes how we might sequence words in meaningful ways. Sequences are like sentences if a pattern is like a word.
A pattern language is a set of patterns that express their relationships and act together. They guide you on how to apply them in the intended order.
Looking at the graph above, it makes sense to improve the Sprint Planning before the Daily Scrum. A solid Sprint Planning leads to a better Daily Scrum.
There are several sequences, for example for scaling or for building a highly effective team.
How?
I recommend starting with some online pattern reading. Individual patterns can be used as a reference book by anyone. You’ll learn about the reasoning and forces that are at work.
You can experiment with the pattern languages and choose patterns to improve the system when you’re more experienced and helping to develop your new organization.
I propose “A Scrum Book” for further information and inspiration (paperback & eBook). It defines the two languages (to build the “Value Stream” and the “Product Organization”), including graphs that are not released online, in addition to the 94 published patterns.
Who?
Scrum Patterns Group came up with these patterns. The patterns were discovered from monitoring numerous Scrum Teams, both their successes and failures.
The people in this group have several person-centuries of combined experience with Scrum. The solutions tap into the vast experience of a broad international community of product developers. Though pragmatic and grounded in experience, the patterns also stand on Scrum’s deepest foundations and reflect contributions from many early shapers of Scrum, including one of its inventors.
In April 2018, I followed an inspiring training about Scrum Patterns from Cesario Ramos and James Coplien, two main authors.
Conclusion
Scrum Patterns have a lot of expertise and experience to offer. This is my third main source of Scrum information, after the Scrum Guide and the LeSS Framework.
There’s value for every Scrum practitioner, regardless of experience. You can start with exploring individual patterns or you can build your own sequences. They provide strategies and a mindset to transform your Scrum journey.
Go and try them out for yourself!
Resources
The Home of the Scrum Patterns community
Some blogs from the co-author Cesario Ramos
