Scrum makes visible the relative efficacy of current management, environment, and work techniques so that improvements can be made. Scrum wraps around existing practices or renders them unnecessary. Various processes, techniques and methods can be employed within the framework.
Rather than provide people with detailed instructions, the rules of Scrum guide their relationships and interactions. Scrum is built upon by the collective intelligence of the people using it. The Scrum framework is purposefully incomplete, only defining the parts required to implement Scrum theory. Try it as is and determine if its philosophy, theory, and structure help to achieve goals and create value.
We are humbled to see Scrum being adopted in many domains holding essentially complex work, beyond software product development where Scrum has its roots.
We follow the growing use of Scrum within an ever-growing complex world. Changing the core design or ideas of Scrum, leaving out elements, or not following the rules of Scrum, covers up problems and limits the benefits of Scrum, potentially even rendering it useless. Each element of the framework serves a specific purpose that is essential to the overall value and results realized with Scrum. The Scrum Guide contains the definition of Scrum. We have evolved the Guide since then through small, functional updates. We wrote the first version of the Scrum Guide in 2010 to help people worldwide understand Scrum.
This HTML version of the Scrum Guide is a direct port of the November 2020 version available as a PDF here.