E1 — Scrum
What it is: a lightweight framework for one team working on complex problems, where the answer is found by building, inspecting and adapting in short cycles. Source: the Scrum Guide (November 2020, still the current edition).
Fits: one team of up to about ten people; requirements that will change as you learn; a product owner who can decide quickly. Doesn’t fit: fixed-scope contracts with no room to reorder work (use E3, with Scrum inside each stage), a stream of unplanned requests (E2), or one person on their own (E5).
The framework, in brief:
- People: one Scrum Team with three accountabilities. The Product Owner (a single person, never a group) orders the work. The Scrum Master helps the team use Scrum well. The Developers build each Increment.
- Events: the Sprint (one month or less, back to back) contains Sprint Planning, a 15-minute Daily Scrum, the Sprint Review and the Sprint Retrospective. For a one-month Sprint the time-boxes are 8 hours for planning, 4 for the review and 3 for the retrospective; shorter Sprints usually get shorter events.
- Artefacts, each with a commitment: the Product Backlog and its Product Goal, the Sprint Backlog and its Sprint Goal, and the Increment and its Definition of Done.
- The Guide calls the framework immutable: running only parts of it isn’t Scrum.
Where Bansat fits:
| Bansat | In Scrum |
|---|---|
| G0 | A draft Product Goal |
| The FR list (1.5) and its acceptance criteria (1.6) | Product Backlog items, ordered by the Product Owner |
| The product’s purpose and metrics (1.1, 1.3) | The Product Goal |
| Definition of Done (11.2), state matrix (10.7), privacy test (9.9) | Part of the team’s Definition of Done |
| Definition of Ready (11.2) | A Bansat add-on: the Scrum Guide doesn’t have one, so treat it as a team agreement, not a rule |
| G1 | Before the first Sprint; the blueprint is what the first Sprint Planning works from |
| G2 | A Product Backlog item that must be Done before any real personal data comes in |
| G3 | Signed whenever an Increment meets the Definition of Done and Part 13 is green. Don’t hold it for the Sprint Review: in Scrum, the review isn’t a gate for releasing |
| G4 | A Retrospective, plus the 30-day review (11.1, Phase 8) |
Agent notes: keep each backlog item to one FR (or a slice of one) with its blueprint IDs; put the Sprint Goal in the PR descriptions for that Sprint; never mark an item done until the Definition of Done is met, tests included.
How it commonly fails:
- Zombie Scrum: the events happen, but nothing valuable ships and nobody asks users.
- Flaccid Scrum: the process is adopted but engineering quality is neglected, so each Sprint gets slower.
- Dark Scrum: the events are used to micromanage the Developers.
Measures: the Increment against the Product Goal; escaped defects and Part 13 failures; flow measures (E2) if you want forecasts. Velocity and story points aren’t part of Scrum; if you use them, see 11.8.
Related: the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack, by John Coleman, Ralph Jocham and Jeff Sutherland (one of Scrum’s two creators), first published in 2025, adapts and extends the 2020 Guide and marks each place where it departs from it. Read the 2020 Guide first.