Scrum Patterns Summary

The patterns without which Scrum is unlikely to work

These patterns are Scrum. In June 2008, founders of Scrum and Organizational Patterns met together with a small number of other experts from both camps to map out patterns from the book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development as they apply to projects under the Scrum framework. These patterns represent elements of the framework, as well as fundamental practices which dissect the framework into its fundamental underlying components. Because patterns work at the level of structure rather than cause-and-effect, we call these patterns Second-Level Scrum patterns, which can be compared to the First- and Third-level Scrum patterns described below.

These patterns are independent of software development per se. The group also agreed to patterns without which Scrum is unlikely to succeed, and about which Jeff Sutherland said he has incorporated into every Scrum he has started. These can be found on the page Software Scrum Patterns.

The third and final part of the picture is the pattern language by Beedle et al. that describes the cause-and-effect components of Scrum. You can see a summary of those on the page First-Level Scrum Patterns.

See the pattern language picture at the bottom of this page.