Scrum pattern

Definition

A scrum pattern represents a knowledge that has been identified through large empirical studies (eg. The Standish Group gathers a large amount of IT data on real-life IT failures since 1985, ranging from small to large projects ).
By analyzing the ingredients that make a project fail or succeed, a scrum pattern helps you :

• identify and provide a name to a recurring problem within your team
• offer a solution that is known to work with other team
• use and deploy a given pattern, along with its potential limitations and sometimes with some related patterns

By formalizing a problem and providing a solution that has been tested across multiple organizations, a team could significantly increase their productivity, while keeping the individuals happy to work as a whole and self-organized team (i.e. with no hierarchy threatening people and assign tasks to individuals).

When many patterns are identified, they are gathered into a collection and maintained by an given organization/association.

History

In October 2011 Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released "The Scrum Guide, The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game" . It is a simplified version of the previous guides, so that only the core Scrum is present. The two creators of Scrum made this framework available for free to the community (but they still remain the owner) so that additional advices, improvements and initiatives could be launched. Since then, various communities have further developed scrum patterns. Number of patterns and name of the same pattern may vary depending on the community.

"Scrum pattern" refers to both Scrum Scrum (development) that is an agile software development and also to Software design pattern. Similarly to Software design pattern, we could find Scrum Anti-pattern, which gathers a list of all bad practices that guaranties either the failure of a projects or the generation of lots of frustrations.

Usage

When you want to move toward agility either on a new project or an existing one, a scrum pattern helps identify and communicate the change needed to the development team and the management. Instead of picking-up randomly any Scrum artifact and implement it, the usage of Lean software development, specifically the Kaizen (i.e. in Japanese "philosophy of improvement"), one could quickly increase a team's velocity in a structured way with low efforts but high Return on investment. Once this small but efficient improvement is in place, go to the next Scrum pattern on the list.

For further improvements, you have to have sharp soft skills and a great help will come from the knowledge of disciplines such as:

• Transactional Analysis or Neuro-linguistic programming (aka NLP), a more easier one to understand, the PCM©, Process Communication Management©) to understand people.
  
  

• Cognitive bias, which is a Psychology tool that is a collection of known bias patterns understanding, in order to prioritize your improvements

Examples

Example of a Scrum pattern collection

Some of them are free and translated into English . Therefore, the name of the same scrum pattern could vary depending its "inventors".

Detail of a specific Scrum pattern - The Interrupt Buffer

When a development team has identified that the most important impediment that generates frustrations in their job is the constant interruption of their work (either from management or any disruption), which in turn forces them to do unplanned multi-tasking (which as been proven to slower productivity ), a ScrumMaster could start to implement the scrum pattern called "Interrupt Buffer".

Further reading

• http://jeffsutherland.com/ScrumPapers.pdf
  
• Example of small improvements with high value added: Using Story points instead of Hours http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2010/04/story-points-why-are-they-better-than.html

Videos

• Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell, by Henrik Kniberg