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What Are The Five Key Values Of The Scrum Framework? This Might Surprise You!

We have already mentioned that the scrum framework is not only a software engineering process. It also has a robust set of underlying principles. 

In fact, most of the professional business domains can apply and utilize these principles.

It’s not enough to get a scrum certification to be hugely successful with the scrum. You should possess a firm grasp for scrum values to succeed with the Scrum framework 

So that you’re going to deliver a great job and fantastic software that your customers and employers love. Let me now tell you more about those principles of the scrum process. 

Scrum Value #1. Courage

There are times when doing the correct thing to serve the best values and benefits for our clients are not the easiest. In such moments, scrum master, scrum product owner, and the scrum team members should remember their duty and obligation. 

That’s to build the best possible products and services in their particular business and information technology domain. To be better than mediocre, a scrum team should sooner or later face difficult decisions that won’t make everyone happy in their particular ecosystem of stakeholders.

To deal with this, all members of the scrum team should remember what they learned during their scrum certification training. 

They should remember to be courageous, and they should master to decide and act courageously.

Scrum Value #2. Focus 

With the scrum framework, when you hear the value focus, you should be thinking about two things: 

• Identification of correct work:  What tasks are necessary to deliver the goals of my sprint? What are essential to developing the best software products and services for my clients so that they will be pleased with my work?
• Prioritization: What tasks should I be working on next?

Each moment in time, there is one critical question that the entire scrum team, including scrum master and product owner, must be answering. 

This question is: “What are the most important things we should be doing at the moment to fulfil reasons of why an employer hired us in the first place?” 

Scrum framework has several built-in events (rituals) to ensure the reasonable prioritization of user stories and tasks. According to the scrum process, the prioritization of user stories and their associated tasks should have a continuous priority. 

So we make sure that the scrum team works on the right things in the correct order. 

Some of the built-in scrum ceremonies (scrum events) to prioritize our work and adjust our focus are: 

• Scrum Grooming (Backlog Refinement) Meeting: Grooming Meeting solely focuses on prioritization for Product Backlog to prepare it before the upcoming Sprint Planning Meeting.
• Sprint Planning Meeting: These meetings help us see the dependencies and correct order of work to deliver our user stories.
• Daily Scrum Meeting: Daily Scrum (Daily Stand-Up) Meeting supports us to set the tone of an upcoming workday. We must direct our focus on where it’s most required.
• Sprint Review Meeting: Sprint review meeting indirectly shows us where the emphasis of the 21 scrum team must be channeling to have more successful reviews in the future.
• Sprint Retrospective Meeting: These meetings support the scrum team to prioritize what aspects of their engineering process must be first improved.

Here in this section, I covered scrum rituals only from a focus point of view. You can find a more detailed explanation about the scrum ceremonies later in this material.

Having read all these, it must be evident for you now how essential prioritization and focus for the scrum framework are. 

Scrum Value #3. Commitment 

Without the commitment of scrum master, scrum product owner, and the scrum team, there is no possibility to deliver outstanding results with software. 

In the world of the scrum software development process, most people translate the commitment value as the agreement and confinement of goals of given sprint deliverables. 

Although this entirely makes sense, that understanding is not flawless. Whenever you hear the word “commitment” within the context of scrum values; what you should remember is the word: “obsession”.

To be successful in software engineering and, in life and business, you should become obsessed with your goals. So in the context of the scrum process, you should become obsessed with creating marvelous software for your clients to solve their problems.

Why are commitment and the associated obsession with scrum goals so important? Because without the obsession with the team’s mi ssi on to bui l d and del i ver astoni shi ng software, each time the scrum team encounters a non-trivial impediment, your work will slow down and stall. 

Then the scrum master and the scrum team will start creating explanations to justify and legitimize for scrum product owner why they’re unable to deliver sprint goals. Excuses should have no more room in your team if your goal is to become a better than an average scrum team. 

Only with an enormously high level of dedication, it’s relatively more comfortable and fulfilling to solve the problems of our clients and help and build value for them with software. 

Scrum Value #4. Respect

Regardless of their age, gender, race, belief, experience, competence, opinions, and work performance, every member of a scrum team must respect and count on each other. 

This respect is not only confined within the boundary of the scrum team. Moreover, every internal or external IT and business stakeholder who interacts with the scrum team is utterly respected and welcomed by a scrum team. 

Experienced team members must pay attention in order not to invalidate the willingness of the contribution from less experienced team members. 

It’s particularly crucial to properly receive and answer opposite opinions that the majority of the group do not agree with.

Scrum Value #5. Openness

The scrum value “openness” is often one of the primary differentiators between an average and high-performer scrum team. It would help if you resembled the openness capability of a scrum team to the vast ability of a collection of open minded individuals. 

They’re creative, innovative, intellectual, honest, direct, and humble. In the scrum software engineering and delivery process, there is no inappropriate opinion, decision, and action.

The only condition is that they must be transparent, and they should aim to contribute to the joint mission of the scrum team. 

It doesn’t mean that every decision and action must necessarily accelerate the outputs of the scrum team, and they should result in substantial success stories. 

Thanks to openness and courage values, the scrum software development group is not afraid of making mistakes. They see their errors and less than optimal outcomes as vital chances to meaningfully improve their overall productivity and quality of work.