Using the Scrum Values Every Step of the Way

A central theme of this book is how to apply the Scrum values during the many complicated situations you’ll face while playing the game of Scrum. But what do the values mean to you both as an individual and as part of a team?

When your organization first adopts Scrum, the folks on your team may have a wide range of feelings about that change. For example, someone who’s used to being a hero coder may have a hard time adjusting to being equal to all the other developers. And someone who was formerly a project manager (and is now the product owner) may feel like the skills they’ve spent years honing may be irrelevant in Scrum. But hopefully, a lot of your team members will be enthusiastic about the many benefits that Scrum offers and will be excited to start working as a lean, mean software development team.

The Scrum values give Scrum teams a core set of values that they hold to and live by. Living these values helps team members bring their authentic selves forward and creates the alignment needed for them to do their best work. But for many teams, adopting the Scrum values isn’t quick or automatic. It takes dedication and hard work for a team to establish its own identity and to embrace the Scrum values in a way that works for them.

As Scrum masters, part of our role is to help teams discover what they value and how they internalize the Scrum values. Make a point of having your team reflect on the Scrum values during sprint retrospectives or at some other time. The important thing is that these discussions happen.

Here are a few powerful questions to ask the team as they explore the Scrum values:

• Why do courage, commitment, focus, respect, and openness matter? Ask people to give examples of situations where specific values helped them.

• How do we act on the Scrum values? If your team members aren’t using the values to guide their actions, they risk performing uninspired, mechanical Scrum.

• What happens when the Scrum values aren’t present on our team? One example: without respect, team members may lack the courage to be open with one another.

Once you feel that your team is aligned on the Scrum values, you can use the values as a decision-making tool. Teams inevitably get stuck. Decisions about a process, tool, architecture, or team practice can get complicated quickly. As the Scrum master, try to recognize when the team is stuck and use these powerful questions to help focus the discussion and reach a consensus.

Often, the team will make a decision based on the Scrum values and move forward with its work. But sometimes, problems will arise that truly challenge the team. Your Scrum team will ignore past agreements, violate the Scrum values, and not meet their commitments. This is normal, but when it happens, you need to take the opportunity to inspect and adapt the team’s practices based on this experience.

The sprint retrospective, which we discuss in detail in the last chapter of this book, is a great opportunity to explore how to help a team that’s struggling with the Scrum values. This work can be difficult, but it’s important to help team members come together and align toward a common goal.

After your team hits a rough patch, ask the following questions (or ones like these) during the sprint retrospective, as your team works to regain alignment and adapt its understanding of the Scrum values:

• When is it difficult to live the values of courage, commitment, focus, respect, or openness?

• What gets easier when we embrace the Scrum values?

• Which Scrum value(s) helped us the most this sprint?

• Is there a specific value that you think we especially need to work on within the team?

After this important discussion, you need to turn the insights you glean from it into actionable product backlog items for continuous improvement. That will help the team be accountable for their culture and the way they work together. Improving on how we embrace the Scrum values and making the improvements actionable is how we grow as both individuals and as a team. So let’s discuss some ways to turn your insights into actions.