The latest version of The Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit was released in May 2020, with an update of the book Choose Your WoW!. The DA tool kit aims at providing straightforward guidance to help organizations streamline their processes in a context-sensitive manner, providing a solid foundation for business agility. As PMI states it the DA will help you “choose the right agile approach for your situation”, and will also set you free from “prescriptive agile frameworks like SAFe® or Scrum.”

   In this edition of the recommended read we decided to take a look into the updated version of the Scrum guide for a few reasons: in order to understand how different is the DA you need to know what the popular agile framework are and what they are standing for; many of us work in a Scrum environment, and last but not least one of the most important updates of the Scrum guide is that is it is not that prescriptive any more.

   The Scrum guide has been completely rewritten coming down to only 13 pages in much more simple and easy to understand words. For example, the 3 questions for the Daily Scrum have been removed, so that developers can propose any structure for the event they want. The “Developer team” within the Scrum team also disappeared, so that now we have only a Scrum team consisting of Developer, Scrum Master, and Product Owner. No more us and them. Alongside the Sprint goal, now we also have the concept of Product goal. And of course, everything is about commitments:

• Product Goal is the commitment for the Product Backlog.
• Sprint Goal is the commitment for Sprint Backlog.
• Definition of Done is the commitment for the Increment.

   What’s New In the 2020 Scrum Guide Update, by Maria Chec - for a quick overview on all changes we recommend looking into the article by Maria Chec published on Medium.

   What 4 Key Changes To The Scrum Guide Tell Us About Scrum, by Christiaan Verwijs - if you want to dive into more details and an analysis of what the changes actually mean, definitely check the publication by Christiaan Verwijs, because as he states it “it is more helpful to understand the underlying patterns and how they reinforce what Scrum has always been about.” The article also provides great visual representation of the 4 key changes.

   You may also find the side to side comparison of the Scrum guide 2020 and 2017 interesting.