Scrum Framework: Pillars, Principles, Best Practices

Scrum is an Agile framework that helps businesses of all shapes and sizes adapt to dynamic product requirements.

In this article, we’ll discuss the Scrum framework basics: its values, principles, and practices, differences to other project management methodologies, and which businesses its best for.

Key Takeaways

Scrum is an agile approach for software development teams, introduced by software developers Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in 1995.

Its history can be traced all the way to the 1980s, when an article was published in the Harvard Business Review, describing a scalable, team-based approach to project management.

Scrum’s basic principles and values are based on working in shorter sprints and delivering workable software in smaller increments.

This is based on the Agile manifesto—but what makes Scrum different from other Agile methodologies are its specific “artifacts” (or tools) and Scrum ceremonies used during project workflows.

We’ll discuss these Scrum fundamentals in more detail.

But first, you might be wondering—why Scrum? In the original paper from 1986, the authors Takeuchi and Nonaka used metaphors to describe product development.

Rugby was used to refer to a holistic approach that we recognize as Scrum, which is where the name comes from:

Source: The New New Product Development game

Next, we’ll describe what this holistic approach means, through pillars, values, and principles.

There are three core pillars of Scrum, known also as the principles of empirical process control: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

Scrum has five key values: commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage. This shows Scrum’s focus on people-oriented development, where teams can work transparently and self-organize to deliver high-quality work.

Scrum is built on core principles that align with the broader Agile Manifesto, emphasizing flexibility, team collaboration, and iterative progress.

The six key Scrum principles—empirical process control, self-organization, collaboration, value-based prioritization, time-boxing, and iterative development—are deeply connected to the Agile manifesto principles.

1. Empirical Process Control: Relies on transparency, inspection, and adaptation, allowing team members to learn from experience and continuously improve.

2. Self-Organization: Scrum teams are empowered to manage their own work, fostering creativity, accountability, and ownership.

3. Collaboration: Emphasizes cross-functional teamwork, stakeholder involvement, and continuous feedback.

4. Value-Based Prioritization: Ensures that teams deliver the most valuable work first to maximize customer satisfaction.

5. Time-Boxing: Scrum events (sprints, standup meeting, etc.) maintain a structured pace, ensuring productivity and predictability.

6. Iterative Development: Embraces a cyclical, iterative approach, allowing a team to refine products incrementally with each sprint.

Now that we’ve explored the similarities between the workflows of Scrum development teams and Agile teams, what are the differences?

While Scrum is a subset of Agile, there are key differences in how we understand them. Agile is a broad philosophy that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement, while Scrum is a specific framework that provides structure through defined practices, which includes roles, artifacts, and ceremonies.

These practices organize the workflows of product development teams, but they aren’t prescriptive for the most part. Teams are encouraged to take what works for them and modify what doesn’t.

First, let’s describe the basic practices of Scrum projects, starting with Scrum roles.

Within the Scrum framework, each role has clearly defined responsibilities that contribute to the overall success of the project. The main roles of Scrum teams include the product owner, Scrum Master, and the development team.

The first two are strategic and interpersonal roles, while the development team brings the product idea to delivery. An effective Scrum team works together to achieve continuous improvement and implement customer feedback for a great end-result.

The product owner leads the product vision by deciding which features and functionalities should be included in the final result.

The product owner is also responsible for ensuring that they’re implemented in the right order, depending on their importance to the client and potential future users.

The role provides a point of contact between project stakeholders and development teams, and ensures that everyone has a clear vision during current and future sprints.

The Scrum Master ensures that the entire team understands and works together according to Scrum values, principles, and practices.

Unlike a project manager, a professional Scrum Master is more of a leader than a manager. They provide support and coaching to the team and ensure that everyone can work productively without external or internal interferences.

In practice, this role often involves:

Finally, the development team is a collection of cross-functional professionals that work on designing, building, testing, and delivering a product.

The usual size of Scrum teams is up to nine people. Any more, and close-knit collaboration becomes more challenging. Scrum can and often is used in businesses with more developers; there, the standard practice is to break up teams into multiple units, all with their own Scrum Master and product owner.

These teams are also known as Scrum of Scrums, and work independently on specific aspects of a product, but align through regular coordination meetings to maintain a shared vision.

Scrum artifacts are key documents and tools that help teams stay organized, track progress, and ensure transparency in development. They provide a clear structure for planning, executing, and delivering work. The three main artifacts are the product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment.

The product backlog is usually created by the product owner. It’s a prioritized number of features needed to finish a product, developed through collaboration between the product owner and project stakeholders.

When developing a new product, product backlog items are usually new features and functionalities. For ongoing development or retainers, the backlog will often have improvements to existing features, bug fixes, and other incremental changes.

Backlog sprint items are refined and prioritized according to factors such as value, cost, and risk. The entire process of managing product backlog items is known as backlog grooming.

The product backlog is almost always has more items than a team can realistically finalize. This is why these items are reviewed and selected during a sprint planning meeting.

The items that are expected to be accomplished during a single sprint are part of the sprint backlog. Items and priorities are flexible within the sprint, allowing adjustments as needed while staying aligned with the sprint goal.

The backlog serves as a focused to-do list, guiding daily work and ensuring steady progress toward a working increment.

An increment is the sum of all completed work at the end of a sprint that meets the Definition of Done. It represents a usable and potentially shippable version of the product. Each sprint should deliver at least one measurable improvement, contributing to the overall development.

For this to be valid, all work must be fully tested, meet quality standards, and be release-ready if needed. Even if deployment doesn’t happen immediately, ensuring each update is complete fosters continuous progress and transparency.

Scrum ceremonies are structured meetings that help teams plan, track progress, and improve their workflow. These ceremonies ensure communication, alignment, and continuous improvement in each sprint.

The four key ceremonies are sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective:

Each ceremony serves a specific purpose; let’s examine them in more detail.

Sprint planning marks the start of a sprint, where the team decides what work will be completed. The product owner presents high-priority backlog items, and the team collaborates to select the most achievable tasks based on capacity.

The goal is to define a sprint backlog and establish a sprint goal—a clear objective for the sprint.

Effective planning prevents scope creep and ensures team alignment. A session typically lasts up to two hours per sprint week (e.g., a four-week sprint has an eight-hour planning session).

The session usually includes breaking down a product backlog item into tasks and determining whether it will fit within the sprint during the meeting.

Or, if the estimation process is more complicated, the development team can handle the task breakdown process alone and coordinates with the product owner.

The daily scrum meeting, also know as a standup meeting (not to be confused with standup comedy), is a short, 15-minute meeting where the development team syncs up on progress.

Each team member briefly shares:

The Scrum Master facilitates but does not lead; the team self-organizes. The focus is on coordination, not problem-solving—issues requiring deeper discussion are handled separately.

The meeting should be concise and focused and contribute to the shared goal of the sprint. If it becomes too long or repetitive, steps should be taken to turn the meeting back on track.

The sprint review happens at the end of each sprint to showcase the completed work to the client. The development team presents the increment to stakeholders, including the product owner and other relevant parties.

Stakeholders provide feedback, which helps refine the product backlog and prioritize future work. This session is interactive—rather than just a presentation, it promotes discussions about improvements and upcoming priorities.

Its benefits are transparency and continuous alignment between the development team and business needs. If necessary, the product owner updates backlog priorities based on stakeholder insights.

This meeting typically lasts one to two hours depending on sprint length. The main goal is to assess progress, collect feedback, and ensure that all progress made is based on real user needs and business goals.

The sprint retrospective is the final ceremony. Unlike a sprint review, which examines the product, the sprint retrospective is an internal ceremony which looks at how the team worked together during the previous sprint.

The team reflects on what went well, what didn’t go well, and what can be improved. The idea of the meeting is to have an open, constructive discussion where actionable insights can be identified to improve future sprints.

A sprint retrospective typically lasts up to 90 minutes. One idea for how an effective sprint retrospective can be conducted to encourage conversation is to:

This method encourages open and unbiased reflection by allowing the team focus on the most impactful topics without singling one individual out to provide (potentially negative) feedback.

Learn about the difference between a sprint retrospective and a project retrospective.

To summarize, here’s why Scrum can be such a great framework for software development:

Because of this, Scrum is a great choice for software teams that need to move fast and deliver valuable products in a competitive market—nowadays, this basically goes for all teams.

However, Scrum can also be used in other industries. In the following section, we’ll provide an overview of a use case in the field of biotechnological research.

In the book Essential Scrum, Kenneth S. Rubin describes a personal account of a company he worked for, Genomica, switching over to the Scrum framework.

Genomica is a company specializing in discovery informatics platforms for research scientists.

According to Rubin, it faced significant challenges with its previous development approach. Their traditional, plan-driven methodology led to long delays, inefficient designs, and poor collaboration among teams.

Scrum was chosen becuase the team needed an approach that allowed for quick iteration, frequent feedback, and cross-functional collaboration.

Their product had to integrate seamlessly with a strategic corporate partner’s DNA sequencing technology, which required regular deliverables and validation.

The results speak for themself:

As we mentioned previously, while Scrum shares similarities with other Agile methodologies, it has distinct characteristics that set it apart, such as specific ceremonies, practices, and clearly defined roles.

In contrast to traditional project management approaches like Waterfall, Scrum offers greater flexibility, adaptability, and opportunities for client involvement throughout development.

Traditional project management is usually more rigid, focused on documentation, and in-depth project planning. This can be good for projects with repetitive processes, but less so if the development requires innovation.

However, implementing Scrum effectively requires a dedication to embracing its values and priniciples and training and hiring of specialized staff to ensure implementation is proceeding smoothly.

This is a popular question, and it can be a cause for some confusion.
Essentially, Scrum is a framework, not a methodology, because it provides a flexible structure for teams to collaborate, inspect, and adapt rather than prescribing a rigid set of step-by-step instructions.

A methodology is a detailed, predefined approach that must be followed exactly, whereas Scrum offers guidelines, roles, events, and artifacts that teams can adapt to their specific needs.

However, you might also see Scrum referred to as an Agile methodology in some resources, usually to avoid going into these distinctions.

While Scrum was developed in the context of software development projects, the Scrum process can and is successfully applied to other industries.

This is because its core values and principles (of collaboration, progress checks, and time-boxed development) are suitable to various types of projects, such as marketing project management, design, product development, and so on.

Instead of industry, there are other characteristics that make businesses suited to using the framework:

While Scrum is very useful and widely applicable, it’s not a miracle solution. There are projects and businesses where it won’t be the best option.

However, there are other non-Agile and Agile project management frameworks to consider.

For example:

After learning all of the basics of Scrum and when it’s best applied, if you’re still set on implementation in your business, here’s some practical advice:

While this article is focused mainly on basics, there are some advanced Scrum implementations that adapt it to a complex project, a large team, or unique business needs.

Techniques like Scaled Scrum frameworks (e.g., SAFe, LeSS, Nexus) help coordinate multiple Scrum teams working on the same product.

Organizations may also refine backlog management with dual-track Scrum, introduce Kanban-Scrum hybrids for continuous delivery, or enhance sprint reviews with customer-driven validation.

By tailoring Scrum practices, companies can apply its core values and principles in large-scale or highly dynamic environments.

To summarize, Scrum is an approach that can be highly effective for a variety of industries, but it requires a basic understanding of its rules and structures.

Learn how to best organize your team, encourage an Agile mindset, and implement crucial artifacts and ceremonies to ensure effective project management.

All Scrum professionals also need a software solution to complement their processes. A project management software solution that supports task management, capacity planning, and even project budgeting can be a bit asset to your organization.

Book a demo with Productive to learn more.