Five core Scrum Values
When you hear about scrum, you will obviously hear about certain meetings, roles and values. You might think about the Agile Manifesto, which is the fundamental of scrum. When I was preparing for the Professional Scrum Master (PSM-I), I used to learn things by making fun with shortcuts. We abbreviated the scrum values as ‘CCFOR’, shortcut of 5 values of scrum –> Commitment, Courage, Focus, Openness and Respect. As most of us know scrum is very popular framework of agile software development, scrum added 5 values to the framework to make framework a guide which helps team to make decisions.
Courage
Not only scrum team but outside team like management, stake holders or clients are directly involved for the courage of team. What I am trying to say is sometimes we have to convince upper management to start some changes, and management also need to show courage when it decides to trust the Scrum process. The team members support each other in doing the right thing and in taking risks so that they may learn and improve their path to greatness. That includes ‘Accepting Mistakes’, ‘Admitting the Facts’, ’Raising Impediments’, ‘Sharing Knowledge’ etc. Another place when you can show the courage is at planning meeting, where you can say ‘NO’ to the Product Owner, when you feel the sprint backlog is overcommitted.
Scrum Master is the one who should show this value most within team whenever it comes to guide a team. PO also needs to show courage in trusting the development team in addition s/he needs to tell the client that functionality will not be delivered this time if nothing to release. Member of Development team needs to show courage in proposing improvements to the product technically, or processes on the retro meetings.
Commitment
We are committed to new way of working when we are working on scrum methodology. Team members committed to listen to PO for the requirements and priorities to maximize the ROI and SM for the process setup. Commitment can be shown by doing your work perfectly and taking responsibility of any damage caused. Scrum team must be committed in progress and willing to have a plan, roadmap or objectives and stick to them. Team has to be committed to achieve sprint goal by taking care of their tasks and escalating impediments. Team need to achieve project goal in smaller chunks. Being as an individual, you should contribute as much as you can to achieve sprint goal. The Development Team demonstrates commitment by creating an Increment that meets their definition of “Done” not something that is almost done.
Focus
Focus is essential in order to get anything meaningful done, when we are dealing with complexity and unpredictability. Without team focus on scrum goal, the initial commitment of sprint backlog could not be achieved. Iterations and timely delivery in scrum help team to stay focused towards project goal. The team should focus on having a “Done Increment” at least by the end of every Sprint. Scrum master should focus on, team is working on only things from the sprint backlog and is not interrupted with other things.
Imagine that you are working on one of the User Stories from the backlog, but you are constantly dragged away from this by: important analysis for future enhancements, top priority bug that appeared yesterday and it was already promised to be solved today, companywide mandatory meetings or assisting your colleague, etc. This way story you are working can last longer and you won’t finish it this sprint for sure. That is the responsibility for everyone to raise such things as impediments and discuss how to remove them. Each scrum role has a distinct accountability which helps individuals know what to focus on as their priority. The product backlog is a prioritized in order by PO, and that creates focus on what is most important thing to do next. Time-boxed sprint events create a sense of urgency and help us focus on the purpose of the event.
Openness
Scrum requires transparency and openness by making your work visible. Team should open to collaborate across disciplines and skills, to share feedback and learn from another. Sprint Retrospective’s focus on continuous improvement of our team’s interactions, processes, and tools invites an openness to feedback, reflection, and changing how we work. Similarly, Sprint Review demonstrates openness to sharing progress with our stakeholders, as well as openness to feedback and collaboration with them. Openness is the way of showing that the rules of software development are changing and that the work on software is more transparent to everyone. If there are any roadblocks, talk about the options you’re considering or implementing to overcome those obstacles and back it up.
Respect
Everyone has the strengths and weakness and every team member brings something different to the table. Respect is the last value of Scrum principles, but it should be the part of all other values. Even between your colleagues, you need to treat everybody as equal as you can, and you should cheer your success together and embrace your failure together without blaming other. Team should respect PO’s decision about which items are the most important for the business value of product. And PO should also respect decision of the team when they say no more work can be done for current sprint when they are full on their capacity. Respect is crucial so that everybody wants to work in. It also helps to reduce unnecessary tension ‘cold war’ between team members.
While Scrum training gives us lots of information about roles, processes, meetings and artifacts, Scrum values give us more insight about human aspect of team and project. They also give us rough description about ideal psychological and personality profile of Scrum team member.
