3 GREAT and FREE Agile guides...

The Scrum Guide and the others

In two of our recent articles, we covered the Agile Practice Guide and the Scrum Guide. The Scrum Guide is a 19 pages document created and maintained by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber – co-creators of Scrum. It explains the events, roles and artifacts of Scrum as well as the rules which bind them together. The guide is available at scrumguides.org and cover all the Scrum fundamentals.

The Scrum Guide is a great start to learn about Scrum and is even useful to experienced practitioners to review the basics.

But are there other great free resources to learn more about Scrum and Agile methodologies?

The answer is actually yes! We cover here 3 more free guides which can help Agile practitioners to broaden their knowledge and views.

Learn Kanban with the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams

You probably heard about the term Kanban (看板), a Japanese term for a visual board closely associated with Value Stream Mapping. Kanbans were originally used in manufacturing and then spread out to software development before becoming mainstream. Put it simply, a Kanban is an efficient way of visualizing the flow of the work within an Agile team. But visualizing the work is only one (and the most obvious) of the aspects that one can get when using a Kanban.

In the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams from Daniel Vacanti and Yuval Yeret which is available on Scrum.org, you will discover what Kanban is, how to combine it with Scrum and 4 Kanban practices.

Learn to scale up to 9 Scrum teams with Nexus

Sometimes, it is just not enough to have one Scrum team working on a product. There may be times where you need to have more than one team to do that – when you have 2 or 3 teams involved, you may be able to use the Scrum Guide without bending Scrum much. But when you go above that limit, one has to come with rules on how to scale events, roles, artifacts and other essential items such as the definition of done (DoD).

And Nexus proposes just that: how to organize and scale up to 9 Scrum teams* working on a common product. The Nexus Guide was developped by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum and is available at Scrum.org.

*: maximum recommended number of teams in a Nexus

Learn to scale Scrum at large with Scrum@Scale

Sometimes, you may develop products which are so large that they require more than a dozen of teams. And sometimes, you may also want to have more than a large group of people who work with Scrum on a given product but would like to propagate Scrum through the entire organization. If this is the case, then you should have a look at the Scrum@Scale Guide.

Scrum@Scale has Scrum for its roots and take it to its next level: the entire organization. It is lightweight, adaptable and minimally prescriptive. Scrum@scale was created by Jeff Sutherland (Scrum co-founder) and supported by Scrum at Scale LLC, a joint venture between the Scrum Alliance and Scrum Inc.

Further development and trainings

In case you are looking for formal trainings on Nexus, Scrum@scale or Kanban after having read the guides mentioned in this article, please note that the organizations cited above all provide good trainers and training quality.

On our side, we deliver great trainings as well, see some of our customer reviews here. We provide among others trainings on SAFe (the most popular scaling Agile framework worlwide) as well as Scrum ones. So if you happen to be in Switzerland or around, just come and join us!

You can see our trainings and events page for more. Till then, happy reading and happy Scrumming!